


you laugh like you've never been lonely

by bluepeony



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Pennywise (IT), Beverly Marsh & Richie Tozier Are Best Friends, Comedian Richie Tozier, Friends With Benefits, M/M, Reddie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-01-03 08:02:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 41,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21176099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluepeony/pseuds/bluepeony
Summary: On paper, Richie's life couldn't get much better. He's in his twenties, he gets to live with his best friend in a big city, and by some miracle, someone is actually paying him to be funny.The reality is: he's very lonely, and sort of broke, and he's managed to fall in love with the person he's only supposed to be having casual sex with. It's kind of a mess. And he's going to tell jokes about it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Did somebody say modern twenty-somethings-in-the-big-city AU? No. But here it is anyway. Inspired by too much Tig Notaro (if too much Tig Notaro is a thing).
> 
> Warnings for mentions of drinking and having sex while drunk
> 
> Title from Bones by Ben Howard

“My name is Richie. It has been for twenty-six years. And I want to clarify that because I think, sometimes, people think that I gave myself a nickname to make me sound more like a comic. More like your buddy. But no, it's a dumb fucking name my mom has called me, as far as I’m aware, since the day I was born, despite officially naming me 'Richard'. Which means that at some point between signing the birth certificate and leaving the hospital, she must have had a kind of clairvoyant flash forward to what I would end up looking like, and sounding like, and realised that someone who looked like me and had my voice, would not be able to handle the sheer gravitas of a name like Richard. She knew someone who looked like this would not be heterosexual enough for the name Richard. So she panicked. I don't blame her. But I _have_ had to resort to stand up comedy as the only professional platform upon which my name is acceptable. You know, I could've been a lawyer but unfortunately, my name's fucking Richie.

My dad, on the other hand, he doesn’t call me ‘Richie’, _or_ 'Richard'. Or ‘Rich’. Or even ‘Ricky’, which, you know. That one's not ideal, but it's certainly an option. No, actually. My dad calls me ‘Dick’. And I didn’t think there was anything weird about that, until he dropped me off at school one day, and he said goodbye to me using that name, and my friend Stan said, “...Why does your dad call you Dick?” To which I replied, “Obviously because the name ‘Dick’ holds common usage as a variant of ‘Richard’, Stanley.”

And my friend thought about this, and he looked at me, and after a long time he said, with something close to sadness, “He knows he doesn’t _ have _ to call you that, right?”

**

“I don’t think you’re as funny as you used to be.”

“Thanks, Bev.”

“Not in real life. I mean on stage.”

“Oh! Thanks, Bev.”

“I don’t mean it in a bad way.”

“I’m not sure how you could’ve meant it in a _ good _ way.”

“I just mean, your jokes are better when you have a boyfriend.”

“Right. I’ll work on that.”

It’s 2a.m. They’re sitting on the counter of their tiny kitchen, eating Cup Noodles and listening to the couple in the apartment below argue about who lost the house rabbit by letting it out onto the fire escape. Beverly always sticks her head too far out of the window to eavesdrop and bashes it off the peeling frame on her way back in. She does it now, slopping ramen over her pyjama bottoms.

“Ouch! Dammit, I _ just _ washed these.”

Richie hands her the paper towels, then leans behind Bev to close the kitchen window so her nosiness doesn’t cause further physical harm. The couple downstairs have already loudly cracked the case of the missing house rabbit anyway; _ he _ opened the fire escape window to piss outside because _ she _ was taking too goddamned long in the bathroom. So. _ Adi__ó__s_, Thumper.

Beverly gives up on the sweatpants stain and stuffs the paper towel into her empty noodle cup. Laundry is a painstaking process for Bev. She refuses to pay $3.75 to use the washing machines in the basement laundry room. Instead, she submerges her clothes in the bath with a big scoop of Purex and a long umbrella for stirring, then wrings them out and leaves them to dry on the radiators, so that the apartment is constantly decorated with snaky black tights and stripy leggings and floaty cotton dresses, all reeking of Mountain Breeze.

Their place is very small, and Bev is sort of messy, but Richie is messy too, so they're a decent team. They spent two days when they first moved in painting their living room walls electric green, like they'd seen in an old Mick Jagger movie. They host cramped, smoky parties in there, and live mostly nocturnally, and plough through crime drama box sets and Jiffy Pop on their days off, and tidy up intermittently, and this is how they’ve lived for two years, and it’s pretty good.

“I meant to say. Ben came round earlier,” Beverly says, after, when she’s brushing her teeth in the doorway of Richie’s bedroom. This, too, is routine.

“Oh, he did? That’s unusual,” says Richie, by which he means it isn’t unusual at all, and Ben is always here, and even if he didn’t live two doors down the hallway he would probably still always be here.

“He’s invited us to a party.”

“In honour of..?”

“Him. Because it’s his birthday. It’s a birthday party.”

“Thank you for clarifying.” He toes off his boots and flops back on to his bed, and Beverly disappears to spit and rinse, and then returns to sit on Richie’s bed and wait for him to stop scrolling through his phone and look at her.

“So we’re going, right?” she says.

“Where?”

“To the party.”

Richie holds his phone against his chest, obscuring texts from his mother, and Grindr notifications. “When is it?”

“Friday. This Friday coming, not next -”

“On Friday I might be -”

“You’re not working. I already checked with Bill.”

Richie shrugs, going back to his phone. “Creepy. Alright, guess I’ve nothing else to save me. Party at Ben’s. Rad.”

Beverly flops down onto her side, so her face is right next to Richie’s, like she wants to examine his expression. “Why don’t you _ like _ him?”

Richie rolls his eyes, trying to keep his phone - and, more specifically, Twitter mentions for tonight’s gig - out of her line of sight. “I like him just fine,” he mumbles, scrolling discreetly.

“You do not.”

“How do you know I don’t?”

“Because every time I mention him you get this suspicious, squinty look in your eyes.” She prods the side of his face, as though to make a point.

“I’m just - don’t _ do _ that, Bev - I’m severely fucking short-sighted, is all.” 

He scrolls to a stop on one dispirited review, barely twenty characters:

_ First time checking out @caskcomedy tonight. @travis_hines and @RichieTozier were decent. 18% mandatory tip on drinks tho? little aggressive_.

What is he supposed to do with this?

In the background, Beverly is still making a case for Ben Hanscom.

“I think he’s sort of cute,” she’s saying. “He reminds me of - you remember that movie _ City Slickers_? With Billy Crystal?”

“_Didja see his eyes? He’s got crazy eyes _ \- that movie?” Richie mumbles, continuing down the demoralising Twitter feed.

“_He’s a lunatic, I’m tellin’ ya_,” Beverly joins in.

“Where are you going with this?”

“I just think,” Beverly says, getting herself comfortable against Richie’s pillow, “he reminds me a little of Billy Crystal in that movie, and I want to sleep with him. Maybe. And Eddie will be there, and I know you want to sleep with _ him_, so I think Friday’s soirée is a must for our social calendar.”

And as Richie’s mind casts about for something to say that isn’t about Eddie - and lands on ‘Beverly, how can you wanna fuck someone who’s an active member of a local Ultimate Frisbee team?’ - his mind says back to him, in a child’s voice of glee, _ eddieeddieeddieeddie great good yes fine up up up and away where’s my good suit off to the party we go._

**

Sometimes Richie doesn’t think about Eddie. But a lot of the time he does. A lot of the time he can’t help it, because Eddie is a barman at Cask, and Richie is a paid regular at Cask, and naturally this means they make some eye contact from time to time - mostly at Cask Comedy Club.

But Richie holds - with what he thinks could be deemed admirably resilient hope - that one day, possibly soon, Eddie will realise he’s in love with Richie, and everything will be okay.

Eddie. Fucking tiny and sparkling and delicious. Richie’s already done his part. The falling in love. It happened somewhere between them being introduced to one another at the comedy club after Christmas, and trading quite reasonable handjobs three nights later in the bathroom at a New Year's party to which they’d both, no doubt by divine intervention, been invited (it was definitely this, Richie is sure, and not the fact that they both have a mutual friend in Bill, who was throwing the party).

Nobody ever knew about it, with the exception of Beverly who, once Richie’d returned to the party, had pressed one red glitter nail to the blooming purple love bite on his neck, leaned in close, and whispered: “_Slut_.”

Sometimes Richie thinks Eddie doesn’t know about it either. A year and a half of radio silence would seem to suggest as much. Like it happened, and Eddie immediately developed amnesia straight after. Richie had brought it up once - only once - when he was sort of drunk and a gig hadn’t gone so well, and he’d been a little pissed off, and he’d sat at the bar at Cask with his Southern Comfort and Coke and said ruefully, “Eddie? Eds? Tell me if I’m being unreasonable. But just once I’d like you to acknowledge that this here hand touched that there dick as we brought in 2018. Is that fair? Just once I’d like you to look at me with an expression that says _ yeah, Richie, that happened_. This feigned ignorance thing? Ain’t gonna fly anymore, my dude.”

To which Eddie had replied, after a brief moment of silence, and only because no one else was around, “Okay. Thanks for the festive handjob, Richie. I hope you liked yours. Do you feel better now?”

And Richie had not felt better in the slightest.

Sometimes he thinks love, and his stupid, cacophonous heart, is his least favourite thing in the world.

**

Ben’s apartment is exactly the same as Richie and Bev’s, but flipped, and without a living room the colour of a soursop.

“Sorry about the mess,” is the first thing he says, and Richie can only assume that by ‘mess’ he means the two pairs of shoes by the front door, and a post-it note stuck to the airing cupboard that says ‘don’t forget to buy All-Bran’.

“I’ve been reading this book,” Beverly replies brightly, which is how she starts a lot of her sentences, “about flipping negative sentences to make them positive. So instead of saying ‘sorry about the mess’ you can say ‘thank you for _ excusing _ the mess’. It means what you’re saying becomes based on gratitude, instead of faults.”

She’s known Ben long enough now that she can say this and somehow make it seem charming, instead of condescending.

“Ah, well,” Ben grins, clearly into it. “Let’s try that again. Thank you for excusing the mess.”

“You’re welcome,” says Richie. He holds up a bottle. “D’you like White Zin?”

White Zinfandel is his and Bev’s very favourite drink. It’s like all the things they love most: cheap, stupid, and a little bit fashionable. They like to lie at either end of their couch on weeknights, stick a straw in a bottle each, and settle in for the evening. If Bev and Ben are going to hook up, Ben is going to have to get used to Zin.

They’ve brought Ben a birthday present - hipster gin - and a card, signed ‘Your Loving Neighbors’, which Bev tasked Richie with buying on his way home earlier today, and had been annoyed both by the design (it’s just a blank white card that says ‘Happy Fucking Whatever’ on the front) and by the fact there was no time to go out and buy another before the party.

Luckily, Ben seems to find it funny. Richie knew he would. He is, he smugly reminds Beverly as they wander into the kitchen, a comedian, after all.

The party is okay. It seems they’ve arrived in the midst of a decent vibe, because they’re a little late. Beverly couldn’t decide between a moss green velvet dress and an aquamarine velvet dress, and then they got into an argument when Richie said they both looked the fucking _ same_, and then they decided to do a shot of tequila before they left, not out of any great desire to get drunk quickly, but because they both get a kick out of the little red sombrero bottle cap that measures the shots.

Bill is Ben’s roommate, and he’s in the kitchen when they arrive, mixing a luminous punch.

“Try it!” he insists, like a child forcing finger-smeared cupcakes on to reluctant adults. “Step right up and try Bill’s Party Punch!”

He’s drunk, then. It’s not surprising, as his punch is mostly just blue Kool-Aid and vodka, but Richie takes a large glass to make Bill happy, and as the smell of it hits him - like a sticky-floored club at midnight - Richie decides he’s in the mood to get shit-faced, and eat a lot of Chinese food tomorrow.

Eddie’s here, like Beverly said he would be. He’s in very form-fitting jeans, looking lovely, talking to someone Richie doesn’t know. Richie tries to play it cool, be aloof, and hot, and not utter anything stupid to or around Eddie, but eventually ruins it by saying, louder than he means to, “I just remembered how fucking funny Herky was in _ Jay Jay the Jet Plane_.”

Of course, Richie knows - if only because Beverly has pointed this out to him several times - if Eddie really is the man for him, and Richie’s fairly certain he _ is_, he won’t mind the stupid shit Richie occasionally comes out with. He might even enjoy it. Sometimes, when Richie stays after gigs at Cask, and the bar’s not so busy, Eddie will serve him doubles at singles prices, or only charge Richie for every other drink, and they’ll shoot the breeze well into the night, and Eddie will laugh at a lot of what Richie says, even if the laughs are slotted in between shakes of the head, and one particularly recurrent question, “What the fuck are you even talking about, Rich?”

These are Richie’s favourite nights. The problem is, he always ends up finishing his drink, sliding back his bar stool, and saying, “Alright, well. Thanks for the free Jim Beam, man. See ya.” He never knows how to _ continue _ things, how to _ come on _ to someone. When he's single, he only seems to be able to initiate sex when he’s drunk, and then Beverly complains at him for sleeping with someone when he’s not in his right mind, to which he demands, “Well, how _ else _ are you supposed to get it done?”

The first time he had sex he was twenty-one. He downed four shots of tequila, shook it all up in his stomach by dancing to Swizz Beatz, then dropped down next to someone he recognised from his Criminal Justice class and said, “Please, I want it gone. Just take it.” To which they’d said, “Take what?”, and he’d hiccoughed and clarified, “My virginity.”

So he’s been floating around the party for a couple of hours now, trying to get to know Ben better out of loyalty to Bev, drinking Zin and playing Beirut with Bill and Bill’s hopped-up bro friends, allowing himself to be dragged intermittently by Bev to various groups of people while she says, “Tell that one story, will you, Rich? You know the one I mean,” and all the while he’s felt - and maybe his mind, or his dick, are playing tricks on him here but - he’s felt like Eddie’s eyes have been on him a _ lot_.

Richie wishes life didn’t always have to be so fussy. Why can’t he just go over to Eddie and say, “Look, can I just ask, are you eye-fucking me right now, or is it simply the fact that it’s difficult to see anything else when there’s a six foot one man in the room wearing a garish patchwork button-up, drunk on Bill’s Party Punch?”

Reflecting on this, Richie decides he _ is _ reasonably drunk now, and possibly he _ could _ say all this to Eddie, but he’s interrupted by a massive teetering cake with sparklers in it suddenly appearing dangerously close to his head, held aloft by Bill, and any potential speech is interrupted by a roaring and dreadful rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ throughout the whole apartment. For some reason, when they get to the ‘Happy Birthday, Dear…’ part, everyone inexplicably sings Ben’s full name. Richie finds this so absurdly funny that he’s still thinking about it when he lets himself out onto the fire escape for a vape a few minutes later.

Cold, fresh, dark air. He holds down the button on his pen and breathes in a lungful of pear mint, glances down at the trash cans way below where two stray cats prowl about, hunting leftover Chipotle. Not for too long because it makes him feel queasy. The city’s too dirty to see the stars, but he looks back up at the sky anyway, at the moon hanging like a big smoky cheese, and behind him the fire escape slides open and shut again, and Eddie appears next to him.

“Hey, Richie Tozier,” he says.

“Hey, Eddie Kaspbrak,” says Richie, pleased that Eddie found ‘Happy Birthday’ as amusing as he did.

Before Eddie came out here, Richie was blowing smoke rings, which he’s quite good at, but he stops now, in case it goes wrong and he looks stupid and has no choice but to jump over the railing.

“That’s a long way down,” Eddie remarks, like he’s considering jumping too.

Richie leans a little over the bars and points, with his free hand, to a window several feet to their left.

“I live in the sky too. Look, that’s my bedroom,” he says.

“No shit? I didn’t know you lived so close to Bill.”

“Yeah, it’s a real treat for him. We made tin can phones once. I didn’t have the idyllic childhood required for such a wholesome joy, so I got a real kick out of it.” He takes a long pull on his pen to calm himself, because his heart’s suddenly kicked up a beat. “You want?”

“No, thanks. I don’t smoke or anything, so I really don’t have any right to be on the balcony at a party. It’s just I realised I haven’t had chance to say hi to you all evening.”

“Oh,” Richie nods, inhaling again, a little frantically, because this means Eddie has sought him out, and his brain doesn’t quite know what to do with that information. “Hi!”

And Eddie does this thing, which Richie doesn’t miss, where he kind of half rolls his eyes, and smiles and says, “Hi, Richie.” It’s an expression Richie has seen on his face before, at the bar, when a girl had asked him if the pint glass she’d been given was the biggest pint glass they had.

“I had to escape anyway,” Eddie explains, turning his back to the railing and leaning his head back a little, so his throat makes a pretty line in the dark. “It’s getting to that point in the night where everyone’s becoming really philosophical, you know? One of Ben’s friends just asked me how old I was when I first knew my name.”

“I mean, it’s a great icebreaker.”

Richie slides his vape into his back pocket and looks at Eddie. He doesn’t want to go back to the party. He doesn’t want any more Party Punch. What does he want? Why, he wants to live, goddammit!

“If you’re bored, Eds, we could get out of here.”

He doesn’t know why he says it, except that his brain can’t keep up with his mouth, and for once he’s kind of glad about it. He thinks, _Good job, mouth. We're well on the way to living now_.

He can’t follow this up with any actual location for them to get out of here to, however. To try to backtrack and suggest a concrete place - a bar, a park, the coffee shop at the end of the street - would be for Richie to confess that he isn’t entirely sure if he’s invited Eddie somewhere innocuous, or just made a sexual come-on, which he hopes he has, or at least hopes it might be interpreted as such, but to put any other thought in Eddie’s head now (the park/bar/midnight coffee etc.) would be to ruin any potential come-on entirely.

Things could go either way, he realises, so he decides to see where Eddie will lead, because letting Eddie interpret seems the safest option at this point.

Eddie interprets it this way: “Okay. Cool. Let’s get out of here. You go first, though. So it doesn’t look obvious.”

And this is how it’s confirmed that they will not leave the apartment block tonight; they will have sex instead.


	2. Chapter 2

“I’ve recently come to terms with the fact that I don’t really have the natural ability to select what might be deemed acceptable sexual partners. I slept with somebody recently… I don’t know why that got a laugh, but I’ll take it – I slept with somebody recently who decided, _while_ we were having sex, to ask me why I had never had laser eye surgery. And the worst thing about that story is that I responded to the question? As though it were reasonable? It was like, ‘This is great and all, but just out of curiosity, laser eye surgery – interested?’ ‘No. I’ve heard you can actually smell your eye burning throughout the procedure’.”

**

Sex with Eddie is a little like riding the subway at rush hour; any nervous tension tempered by the sheer exhilaration of having been lucky enough to get a seat in the first place.

It’s amazing how quickly a party can make things happen. Eighteen months of pining, and it turns out all Richie had to do was put on a dreadful shirt, knock back some pool punch and kick ass at Beer Pong. And now, here they are, making out on Richie’s bed, in his tiny room, which rattles every time a heavy duty vehicle drives past the building. Killer.

“You’re actually a decent kisser,” Eddie remarks, when they eventually come up for air.

“Thanks,” says Richie. “Sometimes I practise on the back of my hand.” Something like regret flickers in Eddie’s eyes at this, so Richie quickly clarifies, “That was a joke.”

“No shit,” Eddie says, raising his eyebrows. “Do you joke about, like, everything?”

“It’s definitely my preferred coping mechanism.”

“You’re having to _cope_ with me? Wow.”

“Not _you_. Just… myself. At all times.”

Eddie picks at a loose thread on the comforter, not making eye contact. “You know, Richie, you can tell me.”

“What? Tell you what?”

“If you’re too drunk to do this. If you’re too drunk, we shouldn’t do this.”

“I’m not…” Richie trails off, as a thought occurs to him: “I’m actually not. It’s just…”

“What?”

“Well…”

“_What_?”

“I’m just wondering, is this weir –”

Eddie claps a hand over Richie’s mouth. “It’s only weird if you make it weird by asking if it’s weird.”

Richie pulls away again to speak. “I see. And because you stopped me in the nick of time..?”

“I saved it from being weird.”

“You did? You’re a champ,” says Richie, and then they’re kissing again, and Eddie slides a warm hand beneath Richie’s shirt and Richie’s brain short circuits, wonderfully, so that for once the world falls away behind him, and he can stop thinking about anything, and it’s bliss.

**

Eddie spends around three hours in Richie’s room. A brief portion of that time is spent having sex (very nice, though slightly retrained sex, as both of them are conscious of the way Richie’s old metal bedframe clunks ungraciously against the wall he shares with the next-door neighbours) while the rest of it is spent arguing about whether or not astrology holds any truth, whether or not _Terminator 2_ truly is the greatest science fiction film of James Cameron’s career, and perhaps of the twentieth century, and whether or not the Vatican City is, in fact, a country.

Eddie seems, invariably, to be on the ‘not’ side of each dispute. Richie plays devil’s advocate slightly, because he likes to wind Eddie up, then watch him crack and laugh.

Eventually, though, inevitably, Eddie says, “Alright. I gotta go,” in the dead hours of morning, after retrieving his phone from down the side of the mattress. “I’ve got work in a few hours.”

“In the morning?” Richie yawns, stretching. His muscles ache pleasantly. “You work at a bar.”

“Yeah, and if you ever dragged yourself out of bed before three in the afternoon you’d know bars everywhere have cursed their employees with new opening times,” Eddie replies, pulling on his jeans. “It’s 2019, Richie. Brunch is all anyone gives a shit about now.”

When he’s gone, Richie rolls onto his stomach to compose and delete no fewer than six texts to Eddie. They’re all stupid, he decides. Even _get home safe_ seems trite, because he sees Eddie all the time and has never felt it necessary to suggest that he can’t handle himself on the subway. Eddie can definitely handle himself on the subway. He’s little and whippy. Richie pictures him like one of those boxing squirrels he and Stan saw in a taxidermy museum once, fuelled by indignation and moral outrage.

He lies awake for ages. Then, some time later, Beverly comes home, and Richie hears her trip over the doormat, like she always does. She clatters about in the kitchen for a little while, in the way only a drunk person trying to be quiet can, then knocks on Richie’s door and pokes her head around, blowing her fringe out of her eyes.

“Hey little bear, your light’s still on,” she says. “Are you home?”

Richie looks at her for a moment, then indicates the room around him. “Yes, Beverly. I’m home.”

“Oh.” Then she rummages around in her bag, and pulls out something wrapped in tin foil. “I brought you some birthday cake.”

“Aw, you did? Thanks, buddy.”

“You want it?”

“Maybe later. Like, when it’s day time?”

“Okay, then. I’m sorry if I get up for breakfast later and accidentally eat it.” She pauses in the doorway, swinging idly back and forth on the door. She’s kicked her heels off in the hallway, and now wriggles her bare toes against the carpet. She scrunches her nose up a little and says, gently, “You wanna talk, Rich?”

Richie doesn’t have to think about this to know what she means, and to know what his answer is. “No, thanks. I’m just really tired. I don’t wanna get out of bed, though. Could you be a dream and grab the light for me?”

Ever obliging, she presses two bright orange fingernails to the light switch by the door and flicks it off.

“Night, roomie,” she says, closing the door against the light from the hallway, until Richie’s bedroom is swallowed by pitch blackness.

**

The next day, Richie tries to get cash out to buy coffee from the place at the end of the street, and use the change to wash his bed sheets in the laundry room, but the cash point nearest his apartment building tells him to fuck off. The one by the Seven Eleven says the same thing.

Immediately, he calls Bill.

“Have you been paid?” he asks, trying not to sound like he’s buzzing with panic. “I haven’t been paid.”

“I haven’t checked,” says Bill, who sounds like he’s just woken up. “I’m sure it’s fine. Don’t we get paid on the ninth?”

“Yes. It’s the tenth.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” he says again and then, perhaps sensing from the lack of response that Richie feels this is very fucking not fine, he adds, “Don’t worry, okay? I’ll check with Dan.”

Dan is the miserly buffoon who owns Cask, whose job includes the task of sending wages out from the payroll account each month. It’s a simple task Dan is often bewildered by. He used to pay cash in hand, but the legal implications of this became even more mind-boggling to him than paying his regulars on time, so now he coughs up payroll taxes like everyone else, and sometimes Richie gets paid when he’s supposed to, and sometimes he doesn’t, and short of leaving Cask where he’s a paid regular, and going back to grubbing around as a grovelling open mic-er or whoring out his friends at Bringer Shows, there isn’t a lot he can do about it.

He could ask Eddie if _he_ got paid, but then, it doesn’t seem appropriate, given the whole sexual intercourse situation, which is what Richie’s privately referring to it as in his head. _Hey, Eds, last night was a total blast, so thanks for that, but I was just wondering – can you afford to eat?_

Eddie. The thought of last night comes back to Richie, momentarily, like a soothing flood, and briefly he’s happy, and vaguely excited, until he looks at the wallet in his left hand, with his debit card peeking out of it, and remembers he has no money.

He needs reassurance. When he’s off the phone with Bill, he FaceTimes Stan instead.

“Stanley! Didn't you say you wanted to come down for my birthday in a couple of weeks?”

“Well, you haven’t officially invited me yet, so I –”

“Well don’t _bother_. Because I’ll be _dead_.”

“Oh really?”

Stan’s on his computer at home, curls springing out behind big headphones. He’s only half paying attention to Richie, which is annoying.

“I have no money,” Richie continues anyway, swerving to avoid knocking a woman and her toy poodle clear into the road. “The only food in the apartment is half a box of Apple Jacks and that weird soup Bev's aunt keeps sending. When I die of starvation, who do you think will eat me first? The mice in the walls, or that big motherfucking Maine Coon that lives next door?”

“I think,” Stan says reasonably, “if you were to die in your apartment, Beverly would go to _some_ length to remove your body from the premises. Before any scavenging sets in, I mean.” He pauses whatever he has on his computer screen, and slips off his headphones. “Do you need me to lend you money?”

“What? No!”

“Because if you do I can –”

“Stanley, how long have you known me? I’m not _coy_. You know if I was asking for money I’d do it the old-fashioned way: show up at your house with a gun and a cloth bag with a big dollar sign on the front and say ‘fill her up, bitch’.”

“It’s just I seem to recall us having this exact conversation last month, right down to the Apple Jacks. You ever think about asking your boss to pay you on time?”

“He’s not my boss,” Richie points out. “He’s the very unfortunate gremlin I trust to provide me with rent money every four weeks. That’s how it works; I introduce grubby little students on 2am fall-out spots, and he allows me to eat.”

“So, a boss then. Richie, if this is becoming a common occurrence – and by ‘if’ I mean ‘because’ – maybe you should think about getting another job.”

“What, at another club? I can’t do that. Do you know how long it took me to get my slot at Cask?”

“No, like, a different industry entirely. You know? Retail? Catering?” Stan pauses. “Law enforcement? I could kind of picture that. You’re certainly dramatic enough.”

Richie physically recoils from his own phone, and jumps out of the way of a jogger. “Don’t be disgusting. I do this so that I _don’t_ have to work a regular job. I haven’t seen 11am in twelve months, Stanley, and I’m very content with that.”

“_Richie_,” Stan says, in a way Richie is familiar with, in a way that means _come the fuck on, now_. They’ve been friends since fifth grade. Stan has been saying his name, just like that, for sixteen years.

“What?”

“Just sort it out.” Stan readjusts his headphones, as though he’s somehow closed the case, with nothing more than that tepid advice. “So am I coming to your birthday, or what?”

“I already told you, Stan,” Richie says, pushing open the door to his building, without his coffee, and without money for the laundry room. “I’ll be _dead_ by then.”

**

Maybe Richie thought life would have worked itself out by now, or maybe he thought it wouldn’t but that it would be all the cooler and more bohemian for its chaos.

Here’s the truth: sitting at the tiny chipped table in his and Bev’s tiny kitchen, eating Apple Jacks, with $23 in his bank account and a growing complex about the guy he fucked last night, is the least cool or bohemian he’s ever felt in his life.

He wonders how he got here sometimes. Well, not how he got _here_ so much as how he managed to do all the things he thought he wanted to do and still end up feeling like he’s drifting out to sea, aimless.

He lives in a big, ear-splitting, effervescent city. Someone pays him (albeit belatedly) to go on stage and share all the bizarre minutiae of what it’s like to be a human _in_ that city. He has an apartment with possibly the coolest person he knows, or will ever know. They can paint the walls whatever colour they want. Sometimes they get drunk and paint them. They have a kitchen cabinet dedicated solely to liquor, like all adults. Richie can take a bath at two in the morning if he wants to. He can go to the movies, a couple of streets away, by himself, in the afternoon when no one’s around. He goes to a lot of parties. Sometimes, when he’s lucky, he gets to bring home really good-looking people, some of whom are completely out of his league but it's a big city, and things like that can happen in a big city.

And yet, he’s twenty-seven in two weeks, and a part of him – a large part – just keeps saying, over and over, _oh… but it’s not really what we want it to be, somehow, is it?_

**

When Richie first started on the comedy circuit, in college, hosting was pitched to him like a real treat. The MC sets the energy in the room, people told him; he keeps the momentum going; he’s the audience’s best friend. He’s the funniest guy of the night. And he has to _earn_ that spot.

This isn’t exactly untrue. But Richie has learned, through what he would now class as quite extensive personal experience, that the host is a lone figure in a big battle. He’s the guy on the frontline, between act and audience, mopping up blood and tending to the wounded. He’s cannon fodder for the hecklers. His job is to weed out the dickheads in the audience and beat them up just enough that they don’t make the first-timers cry, but not so much that they actually cause trouble.

Sometimes he’s on form. Tonight isn’t one of those times. He lets the audience chatter. He forgets the name of one of the acts. And while his own material gets laughs, it isn’t anything he hasn’t performed before. When he’s finally set free and can go order two Jack and Cokes and a pint of water from the bar, Eddie, who’s also working tonight, says, “Why do I feel like you were hating every minute of that?”

Richie replies, behind a sip of his drink, “Because I was hating every minute of that.”

And he has no real explanation for this, except that sometimes he loves it and sometimes he hates it, and when the second act starts laughing with stage fright, and the fourth act saunters on stage and barks into the mic, “_You motherfuckers better laugh at my jokes!_” then yeah, Richie sort of hates it. He hates saving these people.

“I liked your bit about Buffalo Bill’s erogenous zones,” Eddie says, wiping down a clean glass for Richie but waiting, like he always does, to make the second drink, so it’s still fizzy by the time Richie drinks it.

“I’ve used that bit, like, six times, man.”

Eddie shrugs. “I dunno, I still get a kick out of it.” He laughs to himself, putting the glass down, like he’s remembering. “It’s just,” he chuckles, shaking his head, “so fucking stupid.”

Richie wants to tell him he’s cute. He wants to thank him for being an unwilling audience member at around one in every three shows he does, and still laughing at the same tired jokes. He wants to ask why it’s been five days since they slept together, and in that time they’ve only briefly texted (and barely flirtatiously) and Eddie has Liked only _one_ of Richie’s Tweets, all of which are frankly _golden_.

Instead, Richie says, “Can you do that thing where you twist the orange slice into the whiskey?” as Eddie pours ice into his second glass.

“Oh fuck,” says Eddie, like he’s just remembered something important. “You don’t want orange. You wanna know where it’s really at?”

“Always.”

“_Cherry_. You’re gonna wanna try this.”

Eddie mixes the whiskey and Coke with blood-thick cherry liquor, then Amaretto, then tops it off with a healthy dose of Jägermeister. His deft hands work expertly; it is, Richie has always thought, intensely sexy, the way Eddie mixes drinks.

That said, whatever he’s made is not a sophisticated concoction. Richie sips dubiously.

“It tastes like I just swallowed Halloween.”

“Isn’t it awesome? Bill showed me. It’s called a Cannibalized Christian. Wait, hold on.” Eddie turns to look behind himself, and with a flourish produces a maraschino cherry.

“Fuck it,” says Richie, “let’s have a little umbrella too, bartender.”

“How about a swizzle stick?”

Richie knocks back another mouthful and swirls the crimson fizz in his glass. He points at it. “This drink is absolutely horrible. I love it.”

“Want another?”

“No, thanks. I think I can feel my teeth rotting in my head. Are you trying to get me drunk, or just hyper?”

“Isn’t that a quote from _The Graduate_?”

“No, it’s a common misconception actually,” Richie replies. “The real quote is ‘Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to get me drunk or hyper, aren’t you?’ And then you say, ‘Richie, I am not trying to get you drunk or hyper. Would you _like_ me to get you drunk or hyper?’”

Eddie smiles a little, screwing the cap back on the Amaretto.

“Would you like me to get you drunk, Richie?” he says, but he looks Richie right in the eye as he says it, and he might as well be saying ‘would you _like_ me to seduce you, Richie?’ To which Richie would reply, ‘For the love of God, _yes_!’

He reflects on this later, when he’s walking home, on why everything has to be dressed up just to avoid saying anything directly. Why can’t they all just be honest? It would make things so much easier. Why can’t they just say ‘Hello! I’d like to take your clothes off, if you’ll allow it. Please let me know if you’d like to take my clothes off, and we’ll get this show on the road’.

Then again, honesty isn’t always conducive to good sex. Richie once hooked up with a guy who pointed to an old scar on Richie’s stomach from a childhood fence-hopping accident and told him, “You’d be a lot sexier if you didn’t have this. It looks like aliens took your organs,” and Richie had had a complex about it for weeks.

Perhaps Eddie is feeling that directness should be in vogue too, though, because as Richie’s walking, his phone buzzes with a text from him that says:

** _Now I think about it, we really should get drunk together some time_ **

Even at three a.m., exhausted and in dire need of a shower, Richie can’t keep the stupid smile from his face as he types out a response.

** _ok but I’m a busy man. when were you thinjgb?_ **

** _*thinking_ **

Eddie doesn’t reply for a while, and Richie’s pretty sure he’s fucked it. He drags on his vape anxiously like an asthmatic. Fucking cherry cola flavour, naturally.

Minutes pass. Yeah, okay. Fucked it. In his defence, ‘we should get drunk together’ seems an odd thing to text someone, out of the blue, if you aren't actually expecting the other person to pen you into their diary there and then.

And then, joy of joys, his phone vibrates in his jacket pocket only seconds after he’s resignedly shoved it back in there, and Richie almost drops it pulling it out again.

** _I’m not working Friday. are you?_ **

Richie responds, perhaps a little too quickly:

**_I’m not. it’s a date_.**

This time, Eddie doesn’t take ages to reply.

** _It is?_ **


	3. Chapter 3

“Anyone celebrating a birthday tonight? Nobody? Is anybody celebrating _ anything_? Funeral? Divorce? They make me ask, and I honestly could not fucking care less. Some audience members get really offended by that. _ Oh, you don’t care that it’s my ‘special day’? _ I honestly fucking don’t, I’m sorry, I just think after twenty-one birthdays should be done, man. By twenty-one you’ve earned all the fundamentals you need to get through the crippling miasma of despair that is the rest of life: sex, alcohol, and gambling. You can have 'em all at once, if you're really depressed.

By some miracle I have yet another birthday coming up next week - thank you, but you don’t need to cheer. I haven’t achieved anything. Unless, like, not dying counts as an achievement. Which, incidentally, was an End of Year Class Award I received when I was about nine, so my birthday wouldn’t even be the first time I’ve been recognised for _that_ feat.

When I was growing up, my parents refused to give us special dispensation for birthdays. My mom was obsessed with the idea that if my sister and I were congratulated for birthdays, we would grow up believing that we didn’t have to work hard for attention. All we had to do was remain living. Which, as I’m sure you can imagine, sets the bar pretty low. For my 18th birthday, my mother got me a car. But she had my best interests at heart and, not wishing to congratulate me _too_ profusely, she'd just written inside it: ‘Mom. Hi.’”

**

“So are you gonna tell me? Are you not gonna tell me? Am I gonna have to live the rest of my life forever wondering, speculating, agonizing?” Beverly shoves a huge forkful of pancakes into her mouth and, with some difficulty, begins to chew.

“I’m going to need you to elaborate,” says Richie.

So Bev, after swallowing (hard), elaborates, “Did something _ happen _ with Eddie? After Ben’s party?”

“Happen?”

“You know.”

“I know?”

“Was there a little barneymugging? A little buckwilding? Did you churn the butter? Dip the wick? Dance in the sheets?”

“Oh, you mean did we do the hibbety-dibbety?”

“_Exactly_.”

“Why didn’t you just say that?” Richie takes a long drink of coffee, and he doesn’t stop until the mug is empty. When he puts it down he says, finally, “Well. What do you think?”

She considers this. “I think yes, but I wouldn’t like to assume anything.”

“Oh, please, assume away.”

“So is that a…?”

“Yes, obviously,” says Richie. “I had sex. It happens sometimes.”

“Oh _ good_,” says Bev, like a mother who’s just been told her child made the track team. It’s how she responds to a lot of Richie’s menial triumphs. ‘Oh _ good_, you finally watered that ficus’. ‘Oh _ good_, you actually like something someone Tweeted about you’. ‘Oh _ good_, you got dressed today’ - and so on.

She says, “So that means now you’re…?”

Richie stares at her. “Slightly less encumbered by self-loathing than I was on Thursday?”

She rolls her eyes and pushes her plate towards him. “You want my leftovers?”

“Not now you’ve drowned them in half a bottle of Jo-Lo, no.”

“Are you guys gonna meet up again? Go on a date? When was the last time you went on a _ real date_, Rich? Oh, was it when that guy took you to the aquarium and you dropped a whole Big Gulp in the stingray enclosure?”

“Sometimes you talk, and I don’t know why you do.” Richie considers Beverly’s leftovers, as he always does, and just as quickly gives up on the mess of them. He pushes her plate back towards her. “We’re going for a drink in a couple of days. I mean, it’s not a date. In fact, I’m fairly certain there’s no romantic implication whatsoever.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because I like him! So of _ course _ he’s not gonna feel the same way. Of course he’s gonna spend the whole night saying ‘bro’ and ‘dude’, and ‘bro, be my wingman while I fuck the dude on the door’.”

Beverly blinks, and resumes work on the leftovers. “That is oddly specific.”

“Let’s just say I’ve had some experiences in the past.”

“Honey,” she says, picking up her fork. “I wish you wouldn’t do this.”

“Do what?”

She reaches across the table and takes hold of his hand with her free one. “This whole _ oh, woe is me, no one’s ever gonna love me because I’m so tortured and pale, and did you know nobody’s ever been twenty-six before? I’m the _ only _ one, and you can only be loved if you’re twenty-one and a hundred and ten pounds_.”

It is, Richie concedes, vaguely amusing, and he tries not to give her the satisfaction of him laughing.

“Okay, well, first of all, fuck you,” he says instead.

“No, you know what? Fuck your bad attitude, Richard,” she says primly. She points her fork in his face. “Yeah, I said it. And what? I’m no Alfred Kinsey, but I’ve slept with enough men to know some fundamentals of sex, and one of those is that you have to be at least marginally attracted to someone to go back to their place and get your dick out in front of them. Apparently that’s fairly elementary.”

“Oh, he’s _ marginally _ attracted to me? He’s marginally attracted to me, everyone! Let’s go to fucking Sears, I’m gonna set up my wedding gift registry right away.”

Beverly groans, and buries her red hair in her hands.

“You’re impossible.”

She says this, but later, when they’re at the counter paying for breakfast, she bumps her hip against Richie’s, lightly, no hard feelings. He bumps his hip back, and she smiles at him.

“I’ve had an excellent idea,” she says, tugging on the hem of his shirt.

“Pray tell,” says Richie, pushing a quarter into the candy machine on the counter and twisting it until a handful of sour candy rains out.

“You should invite Eddie to your birthday party.”

“Hm.” He shoves one in his mouth, then offers them to her. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“It’d be weird.”

“Weird how? He’s friends with Bill, he’s friends with Ben, we all like him, you’ve hooked up with him, like, a bazillion times -”

“Right. I mean, it was twice, so.”

“I think that more than qualifies someone for an invitation to a birthday party, don’t you?”

“Okay, please don’t call it a birthday ‘party’, because I’ll be three years away from being thirty, and the thought of calling that anything even close to a ‘party’ is so depressing it makes me wanna puke.”

“I mean, you’re eating Super Sours like they’re peanuts, so I’m not really sure if your argument that you’re too ‘mature’ for birthday parties really stands.”

“I _ am _ too mature. I’m mature as fuck now. At best it’s a birthday get together. A gathering.”

“A birthday assembly.”

“Precisely. A birthday... convocation.”

“A symposium,” Beverly nods, and she subtly knocks Richie’s hand, which is holding a twenty, out of the way, and hands her money across the counter instead. “What do you wanna do for it anyway?” she says seamlessly, not even addressing the gesture.

“I don’t know. I don’t wanna make a big thing of it. Can we just get drunk in our pyjamas and watch _ Cops_?”

“Trust me, that sounds thrilling, but I was thinking something less like what we do every night, and more like booking a table at that Lebanese place you like?”

Richie shrugs. “Yeah, or that.” He peers across the counter. “Hey Mike? Do you like Lebanese food?”

Mike looks up from where he’s counting Beverly’s change out. Mike is the steadfast gentleman who owns Screamin’ Beans, the 24-hour cafe at the end of Richie and Bev’s street and the sole source of their breakfast food if they’re ever awake together before midday. They’ve known him for two years, and in that time he has never once failed to humour them and their idiocy, whether it be at ten a.m. over breakfast, or two in the morning, drunk and demanding the kitchen’s leftovers.

Richie tries his best to ask him a stupid question every time he sees him. Yesterday it was ‘Why do people say things like ‘Godfather Part One’ and ‘Godfather Part Two’, but no one ever says ‘Shrek One’ to distinguish it from its sequels?’

Mike is ever patient.

“Remind me again what Lebanese food generally consists of?” he says.

“Oh, you don’t already know? Okay, let’s see.” Richie counts on his fingers. “Hummus. Baklava.”

He pauses.

“Manakeesh,” Beverly offers.

“That one,” Richie nods. “Would you like to come to my birthday symposium for some manakeesh? Some baklava?”

“Richie, you’re one of my favourite customers, but I do not want to go for baklava with you and Beverly on your birthday.”

“That’s fair.”

“Swing by on the day, though. Maybe you’ll get some free pancakes. _ Maybe_.”

Richie’s current financial situation what it is, he needs all the free breakfasts he can get. When they leave the cafe he briefly grabs Beverly’s hand and gives it a small squeeze, a thank you to her for footing the bill. Again. He’s finally been paid, but after rent and bills and a new phone to replace the one he accidentally dropped on the subway tracks, he’s almost back to square one.

Of course, _ not _ eating 80% of his meals outside of the apartment might help, but what’s he supposed to do? Cook?

“Thanks for breakfast,” he tells Beverly. “And sorry for being a cynical asshole, like, all the time. I know I am. I can hear my fucking stupid self.”

“It’s just what happens when you get old,” she jokes, squeezing his hand back. “Don’t worry. I’m getting old too. We can be cynical assholes together.”

**

When Richie and Beverly first moved into their apartment together, they’d taken a break from unpacking to head down to Screamin’ Beans for the first time. They’d sat in a little two seater table by the window - what would later become _ their _ table - and Richie had rambled on excitedly about their new place, and their new neighbours, and the sweet gig Bill two doors down had promised to swing him at the comedy club he worked at, and the ficus Richie was going to water to glory. Richie and Beverly had made solemn promises to decorate tastefully and cook from scratch. They would invest real time and energy in their work, and watch thoughtful docuseries, and permanently stock semi-expensive wine in their fridge.

A few hours after they get back from breakfast, once Beverly has left for work, Richie lies on the old Ikea rug in their green living room, one hand in a box of animal crackers, the other wrapped around his vape pen. Occasionally, he lets the pen dangle from his mouth while he flicks between windows on his laptop: Twitter, to job searches, to YouTube, back to job searches, to an Amazon page that tells him he can buy 1.4kg of Barnum’s Animal Crackers for $121.

Beside him, a notebook lies open with two things scribbled at the top of the page:

_ murder is ok when superheroes do it _

_ maybe fetishes are genetic and we just don’t know it?? _

This is the sum total of his new stand up material. He has invested as much time and energy in his work as he’s currently physically capable of. He rolls onto his back and stares up at the ceiling of their ugly living room, blowing idle vapour rings.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from Marvel,” he says aloud, to himself, “it’s that murder’s fine when you have a cape.” He points his free hand up at the air, at an imaginary audience. “Good one, Rich. Comedy gold. If there’s _ one _ thing I’ve learnt from -”

His phone buzzes with a text, and because he knows it will be Eddie, he immediately rolls over and grabs it. He knows because they’ve been texting back and forth all afternoon. It started a couple of hours ago, when Eddie texted:

**_I’m sending you this because I know you’ll know who I mean, and nobody else will. I just saw Dennis Hopper in Bloomingdale’s_.**

And Richie sent back:

** _I don’t know how to tell u this but dennis hopper died nine years ago so unless you saw a ghost you got the wrong old man. What are u doing in bloomingdales? _ **

And Eddie had replied:

**_Sometimes I just like to come in here and look at shit I can’t afford. Also I know I saw Dennis Hopper but we can agree to disagree_.**

And Richie had sent:

** _I don’t understand what we’re agreeing to disagree to. he is literally dead?? _ **

Which in turn sparked a two-hour long conversation about _ Easy Rider_, and _ Apocalypse, Now_, and whether or not it was acceptable for Richie to class _ Speed _ as his favourite film of all time, and whether or not Sandra Bullock is actually immortal, and whether it would be imprudent for Eddie to buy a thirty dollar Thierry Mugler bath bomb. Then Eddie admitted that actually he hates baths, and bath bombs, and anything to do with immersing oneself in gunk, and he was only attracted to the bath bomb because it looked like a geode, and he fucking _ loves _ geodes.

If someone asked Richie to write a list of all the reasons he’s absolutely enamoured with Eddie, one of them would be that he fucking loves geodes. Others might be:

  1. The way he purses his lips when someone says something stupid, like he has to physically stop his mouth from opening.
  2. His very faint New York accent, which only comes out when he drops his Rs, or talks a mile a minute (which he does a lot).
  3. His utter lack of regard for interrupting the flow of a conversation. Eddie will say ‘what?’ as many times as it takes to hear what somebody is telling him. It’s like he doesn’t know that smiling and pretending to understand is an option. He wants all of the information, always.
  4. How his hair curls a little at the nape of his neck when the bar gets hot.
  5. The way he bites his tongue when he laughs.
  6. His obsession with classical cinema and Old Hollywood, and his unnerving ability to identify just about any English language movie made before 1969.
  7. The tiny freckles across the bridge of his nose and his big, big brown eyes, and his dimples, and the tiny gap between his bottom teeth, and the little raised scar that cuts his left eyebrow in two.
  8. His ridiculous and consistent insistence that they can agree to disagree on matters of fact.

Richie somehow manages to wile away two hours texting him on the floor, and when his phone buzzes against his chest for the thousandth time and he picks it up, he doesn't even think before swiping to unlock it, and in doing so inadvertently answering a phone call.

“Oh shit,” he mutters, because it's not Eddie.

He sighs.

“Hey, Dan.”

“Rich!” comes Dan’s voice on the other end. “You, uh… you picked up?”

“What can I say? I’m feeling amiable.”

Dan deals with not knowing what ‘amiable’ means by ignoring it.

“So listen, Rich, we’re having a little switcheroo on the rota this week. How would you like to work on Friday?”

This is why Richie usually ignores Dan’s calls and texts him instead. The immediacy with which he’s expected to respond to a new schedule is simply too overwhelming.

“Friday?” he flounders. “This Friday? Uh, well… uh… I guess I could open? I could open. Is that okay?”

“No, I don’t need you to fill a slot, I need you to host. Is that alright? So we’ll start usual time, get here for about eight, finish around two. But if we set up early enough we’ll offer a few minutes to whichever eager open mic-ers wanna queue outside, so maybe you should get here for seven instead. That cool?”

Richie takes a deep breath. “I can’t do that, I have plans. I can’t - I can start for you but I can’t - not the whole night.”

“Seriously? What plans could possibly be more important than another wonderful night of magic at everyone’s favourite comedy club?”

“Well.” Richie sighs, and momentarily presses the edge of his phone into his forehead, hard. “Okay, what night am I getting off?”

“What?”

“You said it was a ‘switcheroo’.”

“Right. Well. Technically, I can’t give any of your nights to anyone else. The guy we had booked for Friday has just dropped out… like, completely. Of his whole employment contract.”

“So it’s not a switcheroo at all,” Richie says flatly. “It’s an adderoo. You hoodwinked me.”

“Look, weren’t you just chewing me out, like, two days ago over how I don’t give you enough money? Now I’m giving you more and you’re pissed?”

Richie pulls a face he wishes Dan could see. “The issue was that you didn’t pay me on time, not that I want to work more than six nights a week.”

“Oh man, you _ millennials_. You know, when I was your age, I was shovelling snow on the weekends in Idaho on _ top _ of my full-time job.”

“Dan, first of all, you’re thirty-two, you're not a baby boomer. And secondly, you’ve never fucking lived in Idaho. Stop telling people you lived in Idaho.”

“Okay, so I’ll see you at seven on Friday?”

“Sure! Hey, maybe set up a little tent for me by the side of the stage, I’ll just live there.”

“You know, Richie,” Dan says, levelling his voice, “one day I’m not gonna put up with you being a little bitch to me anymore. I’m going to put someone else on your slots. You can’t talk to your employer like this.”

“You just called me a little bitch! I could take you to the EEOC, you know.”

“Good luck with that, Rich. I’ll see you on Friday. Oh, and by the way? I _ did _ live in Idaho. I lived in Sun Valley. Okay?” Then he rings off.

“Fuck you, Sun Valley,” says Richie, tossing his phone across the rug.

He groans. He knows that he doesn’t have to take the work. And he knows that even if he didn’t, Dan wouldn’t stop booking him, not unless Dave Chapelle wandered in asking for a job.

But he _ does _ need the money. The question is, does he need the money _ more _ than he needs to go for drinks with Eddie?

He’s an adult. He supposes he should be making adult decisions.

**_ So dan just called me_**, he texts, after writing and re-writing the message sixteen times.

_** You answer Dan’s calls?**_ Eddie texts back. **_That's gross_.**

** _ I didn’t mean to. And now i have to work on friday. I said no but he said yes, so u know. I'm sorry. can we raincheck? _ **

** _ Hmm. Nah, sorry. _ **

It’s a joke. Richie’s fairly certain it’s a joke. It must be a joke. Only it’s difficult to tell, so he doesn’t respond, and then he hides his phone under a sofa cushion when it gets too painful to look at. Then it buzzes a short while later, vibrating the cushion, and it’s Eddie saying:

**_Joking. Yeah, that’s fine_.**

And Richie, who talks for a living, doesn’t know what to say to that. Doesn't know how to respond if he isn't being given a time, and a place, and definite clarification that he's not an asshole for going to work. He puts his phone back under the cushion. And he tries not to think about the fact that he’s choosing work over the person he’s probably irrevocably in love with. And he tries not to think about the fact that he’s so tired of sitting on this fucking rug, on his own, waiting for something to start.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for drinking and very, very brief mention of drugs.

“My best friend Stan is a little older than me. He’s twenty-seven years old, and he recently got ID’d trying to buy Kombucha tea, Elmer’s glue sticks, baking soda, and half a tank of gas. He called me, very upset by the whole thing, completely abashed that anyone would ask for ID from a twenty-seven year old man before they would allow him these particular purchases. I explained to him they probably just wanted his name and address out of concern over whatever janky fucking bomb he was clearly planning to make.

But me, I’m younger. I’m twenty-six. And a few weeks ago, I went to buy a six-pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. For which I had personal reasons.

And I felt, perhaps naively, that this purchase in and of itself ought to have made my age apparent. It did not. The girl serving me had one of those checkout systems, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen them, it’s where the cashier has to declare and, like, key in how old they think the customer is? And I guess it’s so that if they’re wrong and it comes back on them, they can say, ‘Well, I thought he was of age, I thought he was, you know, twenty-two, maybe twenty-five…’

I happened to glance at the screen where it was showing the age she’d assumed for me? Thirty-eight.

And I realised, in that moment, that she probably thought that the likeliest scenario for me being in that store was that I was a thirty-eight year old man who had been threatened into buying a six-pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade for a group of Freshmen loitering outside the door.

And it’s like, once you have that kind of knowledge about yourself, that that’s the kind of vibe you give, where do you go from there? What positive message can you glean from that situation? I mean, you think life can’t get any worse, and then that happens? I haven’t slept in weeks.”

**

Stan visiting is probably the best birthday present Richie could ask for (except perhaps a year’s paid rent, or requited love). Stan, standing there on the train station platform, with his shrewd eyes and permanent beanie, wearing the sheepskin denim jacket he’s had since he was seventeen.

“Stan! What are you doing here?”

It’s the same thing Richie says every time he comes to pick him up from the train station, and Stan is still yet to show any outward sign that he finds it amusing. Instead he hugs Richie, hard, and says, “God, I missed your dumb self. Happy birthday, you old, old man.”

As luggage he’s carrying a small backpack and nothing else. Stan has never been great at packing. He’ll probably end up wearing something of Richie’s to go out in, and then complain about it.

On their way back to the apartment Stan talks about college. He’s in his second year of a Master’s programme at Brown, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, because he’s smart as anything and always has been. He tells Richie about his back-breaking term paper, and his university’s new state-of-the-art lab with LCD screens on the walls that integrate with his laptop and make his heart sing, and the decades-old professor he’s pretty certain he has some sort of weird, slightly Grecian erotic fixation on.

“But what about you?” Stan asks suddenly, as they round the corner onto Richie’s street, passing Screamin’ Beans.

“What about me?” Richie says. It comes out a little defensive even though he doesn’t mean for it to.

“What’s going on in your life?” Stan clarifies.

It's a strange question, really, because they talk every day, and it’s not like Richie is in the habit of leaving out anything funny, or stupid, or weird. He always wants to make Stan laugh. At this stage, it’s pretty much one of his only goals in life.

Perhaps Stan doesn’t mean that kind of thing, though. Perhaps it might be a cue to confide in him all the _ other _ stuff, the stuff that’s been sending Richie dizzy the past few weeks, but Stan’s just travelled from Rhode Island, and he doesn’t deserve to have Richie’s problems jettisoned on to his shoulders, does he, so Richie just slings an arm around his shoulder as he pushes the door to his building open and says, “Oh, I have plenty of erotic fixations too,” and then changes the subject and says, “So are you still trying to be vegan? Because Bev got the most _ awesome _ birthday cake for me, but I have to warn you it’s, like, 90% cream cheese frosting.”

Richie never fully appreciates how much he misses Stan until he’s here, in Richie’s apartment, or Richie is there, with Stan at college. He watches Stan potter around the place, chattering away with Beverly, graciously accepting her awful fruit teas and a frankly gargantuan slice of birthday cake. In twenty years not a birthday of theirs has gone by that they haven’t spent together, except for the Fall that Stan turned eleven and was whisked off to Gran Canaria by his parents, and Richie actually cried.

“So what’s the plan for tonight?” Stan asks, finally surrendering his cake plate with a quarter of a slice still left.

“Well,” Beverly pipes up from the kitchen, overhearing, “first of all, Richie’s going to let me give him a haircut -”

“I’m not,” Richie tells Stan.

“A little short-back-and-sides moment -”

“I’m -”

“Little ‘80s pompadour moment -”

“Not.”

“And then on to a fine dining experience at Café Beirut,” Bev says, sticking her head round the door, “and lots of tequila. Do you like manakeesh, Stanley?”

“Love it,” says Stan, clearly clueless.

“If I had it my way he'd be getting a proper party, but I don't have it my way. I fought for one, like the Beastie Boys said I should, but to no avail.”

In a way, Richie feels bad for denying Bev what would be, for her at least, the joyous experience of throwing him a birthday party this year. Which is ridiculous, because it's _his_ birthday, and the right to party, or indeed _ not _ party, should very much be in his hands.

It's just that Beverly is so extremely _ good _ at throwing parties. It's the lifeblood of her social calendar. In fact, Richie has said - and Bill's said, and Ben's said, and random gatecrashers from parties past have all said - that Bev shouldn't be an Assistant Operations Manager at Macy's. She should be a party planner.

For Richie's twenty-fifth birthday, she threw him an old-fashioned surprise party, aghast at finding out he'd never been given one as a kid. There'd been Pass the Parcel, where every layer of newspaper revealed some new and twisted drinking challenge. Drunk Twister. A huge pinata shaped, quite predictably, like a dick. And right beneath Richie's nose Bev had skilfully orchestrated a mass game of Bingo for every guest, complete with actual ticket pads and daubers, wherein a prize could be won for whoever racked up every Richie-ism first: circle when you hear Richie describe something as "bitchin'", circle when Richie brings up his ceaseless and painful sexual attraction to Jeff Goldblum, circle when Richie asks Alexa to change the song to ‘No Diggity’, circle when Richie says he doesn't want to do a shot but immediately does one anyway, circle when you hear Richie talking about _ Red Dead Redemption_, or Sandra Oh, or his enormous dick, or _ Speed_. Double points if he describes _ Speed _ as the greatest film of the 20th century.

Let it never be said that Beverly doesn’t love Richie inexplicably, and wholeheartedly. She always seems to want to bring out the best in him. Even if that just means blindfolding him and making him whack a giant straw cock full of Sour Patch Kids.

He won’t let her anywhere near his hair with an electric razor. But before they go out, while Stan is still napping off his train journey in the living room, he lets her sit him down in her bedroom and comb his hair into something resembling a style. She drags product through it, something waxy and blue that worries him.

But when he glances in her thrift shop vanity mirror he looks… well, okay actually. He might even say… _ good_. What’s the word? Coiffed? He’s almost tempted to hand over the razor and say: _ Alright, I trust you, buddy. Turn me into an androgynous ‘80s waif_.

Beverly insists that even at twenty-seven he needs to stay on the cutting-edge with his appearance. She makes him put his contact lenses in, and wear the boots with the pointy toes that he never bothers with because they pinch. He clicks the ends of them together uncomfortably.

“Is this all really necessary?” he says, taking them off and resolving not to put them back on until they leave the apartment. “We’re only going for dinner.”

Beverly looks at him. She bends slightly to put a hand on his shoulder. She looks him in the eye. He blinks back, left eye slightly fuzzy because his contact lens prescription is a little out of date.

“It may be a cliché, Richie, but all the truest things are. Age really is just a number. It doesn’t mean shit in and of itself. But asking ‘are these super fucking cool vintage thrift shop boots really necessary’? _ That_,” she says, “that is the kind of thing that’s going to make you old, my friend.”

**

Only going for dinner.

Only going for dinner, plus four rounds of drinks and one revolting on-the-house shot of arak for each of them, which Stan has to go and throw up in the gents.

Only going for dinner, then on to the smoky little bar next door for a quick one, just to see what it’s like. Just a quick one. A quick _ two_.

Only going for dinner, then on to a club Bill’s heard is supposed to be _ unreal_, with lithe aerialists on raised platforms and glitter raining from the domed magenta ceiling, where everything starts to get a little blurred...

It’s called Heaven, or Nirvana, or something celestial anyway. Music booms from speakers concealed in its vast and endless round walls; a dull, thud-thud trance to begin with, which morphs into tropical house remixes of old disco songs as soon as midnight hits. Richie’s lost his friends. He’s been adopted by a group of ten or fifteen strangers, all glistening and gorgeous, a little unreal-looking, and terribly friendly. The club is expensive, but they keep buying him drinks because someone let it slip that it was his birthday, and now they all seem to think it’s some kind of superpower, having a birthday, and that it warrants lavish praise and gifts and shots, endless shots, and they cheer with raw, unbridled joy every time Richie does one, and he thinks _ yes, I am a fucking superhero, look at me go_. The song switches to a thrumming remix of George Michael’s ‘Freedom! ‘90’, and a girl beside him shrieks and grabs Richie’s arm gratefully, as if the song had been his idea.

“_All we have to see is that I don’t belong to you, and you don’t belong to me!_” she screams in his face. Then they’re all doing it, throwing their drinks into the air: _ Freedom! Freedom! FREEDOM! _

Then there’s a hand on his shoulder, a hand on his waist, and a boy, sweat-drenched and elfin, is turning him round and spitting a glow-in-the-dark whistle out of his mouth to shout over the music, “Hey! HEY! I’ve seen you!”

“I don’t know,” Richie shouts back, shrugging wildly. “Maybe!”

The boy moves in closer to shout in Richie’s ear, nodding passionately, a finger against his chest, “I’ve seen you on _ American Horror Story_.”

“That’s not me. I’m not famous,” Richie tells him, and even drunk he’s clear-headed enough to be slightly concerned over which gruesome actor he could possibly be being mistaken for. He sort of wants to ask the guy which season he means, just so he can whittle it down a little.

But it’s okay. It’s okay. The boy clarifies, “You should be! You’re hot!” And then he’s putting both hands on Richie’s shoulders, drawing him in and licking his lips which flash blue in the strobe lights. His eyes are large, pupils dilated. “Listen! We should take E together!”

“Oh!” says Richie, disappointed. He thought something more fruitful might have followed ‘you’re hot’. “No, thanks. I’m only into the hard stuff. I popped, like, four God’s Speed caffeine tablets before I came out, so I’m pretty wired.”

The joke is wasted on the boy, who rolls his eyes and immediately loses interest, wandering off into the writhing crowd. Richie looks around for Beverly, for Stan and Bill, for Ben, but he can’t see any of them. His new friends jostle him, trying to get him to join in again; the DJ’s on to a confusing house remix of ‘Rock the Casbah’ now, but it’s no good. The mention of drugs has jolted Richie out of the moment, like a spell’s been broken. Not because he’s bothered by drugs particularly, but because he’s suddenly found a point of separation between himself and the sprawling, sweaty hands all around him. Self-consciousness has reared its head, and now, somehow, he feels a bit of a dickhead with this crowd.

He makes for the smoking area, and bar a few feeble protests, nobody really cares. It’s cold outside, fresh and wonderful. He sits on one of the benches and stretches his long legs out. His toes, in his boots, are killing him. He longs to take them off and hurl them clear over the balcony. Music thrums dully behind the door. He fishes his vape pen out of one pocket, his phone out of the other. There are texts from Beverly and Stan, asking where he is. A belated birthday Facebook message from his sister. Likes and replies to a picture he tweeted from dinner. The caption was ‘once every full moon me and these creeps congregate and take a rare photo together’.

Eddie, who’s working tonight, has replied.

‘It’s not a full moon, so you need to go home’.

Eddie. _ Eddie_. _ Why _ didn’t Richie invite him? Eddie, with his lovely brown eyes and deadpan jokes. What could possibly have possessed Richie to believe inviting Eddie to dinner could have been anything other than a good idea?

Richie takes a drag on his vape and stares at the comment. He’s drunk, and with drunkenness comes the compulsion to say sappy things to the guy he likes. He brings up Eddie’s phone number and calls him, but it rings for a while and there’s no answer.

Richie can just picture him; picking up his phone, glancing at Richie’s name on the screen, shoving it back in his pocket, disinterested.

How stupid could he have been, to make it so patently clear to Eddie that he was thinking of him at midnight, and how embarrassing to have had any attempt at early hours sentimental conversation dashed.

Defeated, he’s about to go back inside, when his phone starts vibrating in his pocket.

“Eddie?” is what he answers with.

“Are you okay?” is how Eddie responds. Clearly, neither of them have grasped the simple concept of ‘hello’ yet.

“I’m fine. I’m great!”

“Oh,” says Eddie, and Richie hears him sigh, what with sounds like relief. “When I get a missed call from someone after midnight I sort of automatically assume something terrible has happened.”

“Well, they just started playing a Keith Urban remix. Does that count?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m…” Richie glances out over the balcony, at the city which is vast and glittering, as though this might help him pinpoint an exact location. “I’m at a club.”

“And you’re calling me…”

“Oh, you don’t want me to?”

On the other end, Eddie laughs. “I’m fine with you calling me. I just wondered if there might be a specific reason.”

“Well,” says Richie, and he sits back down on the bench, and takes a long drag on his vape, thinking. “Well,” he says again, “there is. See, I was on Twitter. I was looking at the picture I posted earlier. And I was thinking, fuck. I should have invited you, you know? Why didn’t I invite you? You’re friends with Bill. You’re friends with Ben. _ I’m _ barely even friends with Ben. I mean, I’m not _ not _ friends with Ben, but I don’t know him _ that _ well. It’s just Bev has this thing about him, and his arms, and Billy Crystal, and he invited me to _ his _ birthday, and… I sound like I’m eight.”

“Richie, it’s -”

“The point I’m making is - sorry to interrupt - the point I’m making is, statistically, you personally know 80% of the people who came to dinner tonight. And not counting myself, because I don’t wanna make assumptions, I know you would class at least 40% of that group as your good friends. I didn’t invite you because I thought you’d think it was weird, but now I feel weird for not inviting you, and I’m sorry.”

Eddie is silent for a moment.

“Uh,” he says, finally. “Well, I’m impressed by your quick math.”

“It has always been one of my strong points,” Richie agrees.

“Richie, I don’t expect you to invite me places because I’m friends with your neighbours,” Eddie continues. “Anyway, I’m working tonight, so it’s not… like, it’s not a big deal.”

“It’s not?”

“Definitely not.”

“Okay,” says Richie, nodding, even though Eddie can’t see him. “Good. Okay. What if I said there was another reason?”

“Is there?”

“Come have a drink with me. When you’ve finished tonight? I mean, I kind of owe you for last week.”

Eddie laughs at this, and maybe it’s just because he’s on the phone, and his voice is so close to Richie’s ear, but it makes something in Richie’s stomach tug with longing.

“I'm at work, remember? We closed early tonight, thank fuck, but I won’t be done until after one.”

“So you’re telling me that an eight-hour shift making endless Moscow Mules for white girls, listening to Dan scream ‘don’t mix the sprays up!’ and watching sweating open mic-ers go mute on stage in the middle of a mother-in-law joke somehow _ doesn’t _require a huge fucking vodka tonic?”

It seems to work. Because Eddie, joy of joys, says, “Well. Yeah, when you put it like _ that_.”

**

Richie has managed to locate Stan and Bill by the time Eddie arrives, which is useful, because he needs Bill to give him the name of the club. And the street name. And general directions to it from Cask. Beverly has disappeared somewhere with Ben, but Richie doesn’t want to consider the potential implications of that right now.

He’s in the middle of telling them about Elfin Ecstasy boy, when he feels a gentle knock against the back of his knee, and there’s Eddie, looking little and wonderful. As Richie burbles, “Hi!” and throws his arms around him, the club - which, Bill has now reliably informed Richie, is called Elysium - suddenly transforms from the half-hearted and perfunctory 1a.m. performance it’s been sinking towards into a new and glittering place of promise.

“Guys, it’s Eddie,” Richie shouts over the music, like they don’t already know. Well, in fairness, Stan actually doesn’t know him, and as he and Eddie introduce themselves to each other as best they can over a dubstep remix of ‘Jolene’, Bill pulls Richie to the bar.

“So this is interesting,” says Bill. “You know you shouldn’t sleep with co-workers, right?”

“First of all, we’re not co-workers. We just happen to do our respective jobs in the same building. Secondly, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Bill smiles. He’s drunk, but his eyes are shrewd. Bill can be a ridiculous person at times, prone to outlandish claims and bouts of melodrama, but he never misses a damn thing.

Richie could do without the droll judgement, but he could do with the tips. He’s never been a very graceful flirt; mostly he just follows where other people lead, or makes glib observations: ‘your biceps are big’, ‘your T-shirt is funny’, ‘your teeth are hella white’, and so on. ‘Your neck is very strong looking, like it could handle a milkmaid’s yoke’ had once earned him a handjob from a Lyft driver, so it’s not a completely ineffectual method of courtship.

He tries not to do it to Eddie, though. Eddie deserves better. Once they’ve secured, by some small miracle, one of the crushed velvet booths away from the dance floor, Richie tries to focus on being as cool and level-headed as possible.

The problem is, resolving to be cool and level-headed cuts a _ lot _ out of Richie’s entire vocabulary, and he can only watch as his friends sit in a circle around him, licking cocktail straws and laughing over a topic Richie is barely conscious of. He’s thinking that he likes Eddie’s Joy Division t-shirt. He’s thinking he wants to say ‘I like your Joy Division t-shirt’ but he’s firm in his resolve not to make pointless statements in lieu of flirting.

He likes that Eddie always changes out of his work shirt into a t-shirt after a shift, even if it’s just to walk home. Richie won’t say that either.

He likes the way Eddie bites very gently on the tip of his straw, for the briefest of moments, and usually around a smile at something someone has said, before sipping. Richie _ could _ bring that up later. There might be something sexy in it if he phrases it correctly, when they’re alone, when they’re…

When they’re what exactly? Richie becomes suddenly conscious of the fact that he has no idea what the plan here actually is. He just knows he wanted Eddie here, he wanted to see him, and Eddie actually obliged, and now Richie’s friends are showing him a better time than Richie is capable of, because he’s too wrapped up in the way Eddie’s sharp little shoulders look beneath soft, washed-out grey cotton. He’s too wrapped up in the way Eddie keeps resting his teeth on that fucking straw.

The more they drink, the higher the volume of conversation around the table becomes, until Beverly - who resurfaced twenty minutes ago, sweaty and pleased with herself, with an extremely pink-cheeked Ben - is literally clutching Bill’s hand and pleading with him to ‘just give Janis Joplin a try, goddammit’.

And Bill’s saying, “I _ have_. I like the one about the yellow taxi! The big one!”

And Stan’s saying, “That’s Joni Mitchell, you _ philistine_.”

And Ben’s saying, “Did she ever find her daughter?”

And Bev’s saying, specifically to Eddie now, “Richie and I get drunk sometimes and listen to _ Blue_. It always makes me cry. It’s very cathartic.” And then, just to clarify, in case Eddie might be getting any ideas about Richie not being man enough, “I mean, _ Richie _ doesn’t cry.” Then she smiles across the table at Richie, as if she’s helped him.

It could be worse. She could be telling Eddie about the time they got high and Richie couldn’t stop crying over Fly giving up her puppies in _ Babe_.

Luckily, when they go to the bar together, just Richie and Eddie, Eddie has the good grace not to mention Joni Mitchell.

He just says, “Buy you a drink?”

And Richie replies, “Jack and coke?”

“No, pick something expensive. Seeing as I haven’t got you a birthday present.”

“Okay. Whiskey and soda, but ask for _ that _ whiskey up there. The one in the big fuck-off crystal decanter.”

“What is it?”

“I have no idea.”

“That _ does _ look expensive. Like a relic. I think I can see an actual layer of dust on it.”

“Regretting the offer, Eds?”

“No,” says Eddie, and orders two. It is expensive. Very expensive.

“Holy shit,” says Richie, laughing, as the barmaid pushes forward their two measly measures and snatches Eddie’s money, like she’s worried he might change his mind. “Okay, so _ that _ is fucking criminal.”

“No, it’s not,” Eddie deadpans. “I always pay a week’s rent in drinks. You don’t?” Then he picks up his glass and knocks back half in one go. “Yeah. No fucking biggie. Want another?”

“You serious?”

“Hell no,” says Eddie, and orders two Jack and Gingers. It’s what he always makes for Richie at Cask when Richie is too tired to think of a drink himself. “So happy birthday,” Eddie says, clinking their glasses, “for _ yesterday_.”

“Yeah, thank God that’s over.”

Richie glances up in time to see Eddie biting his goddamned straw _ again_, like he doesn't even know he's doing it. It’s how he grins at him now, around the straw, that causes in Richie's chest a slightly debilitating squeeze of desire.

They both have one arm on the bar, and Eddie touches his knuckles to Richie’s. The music hasn’t let up much, but they’re close enough that they can just about hear each other without having to raise their voices.

“You don’t mean it, do you?” says Eddie. “All the stuff about hating your birthday?”

The question catches Richie slightly off guard, and he isn’t sure how to respond without sounding too serious. Even drunk, though, he knows that whatever he says, he shouldn’t be honest. Right now, he’s pretty convinced of the idea that nothing sexy ever comes from being honest.

So he says, “Of course not,” and knocks back the rest of his drink in one go. It’s strong and sharp, and makes him feel gutsy. “How could I? I’m here, in this amazing city, with my friends, with you, for my very own birthday. I’ve had some very expensive whiskey. Queen just started playing. And Eddie Kaspbrak just told me he wanted to dance with me…”

“That,” Eddie says, letting himself be led, “doesn’t sound like something he would say.”

“Maybe it doesn’t, but I know what I heard,” says Richie, and as he steps backward, Eddie’s hand in his, he feels warm, persuaded fingers tighten around his own.

He doesn’t like birthdays, no, but it’s not his birthday anymore. It’s two in the morning on March 8th, and Richie feels like he'll be just fine as long as everything stays exactly as it is right now.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: s e x (non-explicit)

“Of course, the problem with being average-looking is that you want to sleep with attractive people like everyone else, but you’re suspicious when attractive people want to sleep with you. Right? Because there’s likely going to be something disturbing that underlies their physical beauty. There’s always going to be a part of you which knows that by accepting the offer, you’re running the risk of ending up in a crock pot. So there’s a decision that has to be made. And that is: ‘Is this person attractive enough for me to risk being turned into a lampshade?’

When I was in college, I had the unique experience of being hit on by an _ extremely _ attractive gentleman in a laundromat. And I specify the location just to make it clear to you that he was sober.

Of course a red flag went up for me, because he looked like Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, and I looked like Adrian in Rocky I. But, much like today, I was touch-starved and insecure, so I went back to his dorm. Where of course, my suspicions were confirmed. That he was weird as fuck.

He took my pants off, and then he took my underwear off, and then he just looked at me for a long time. While I just kind of lay there, inert. And then he said very thoughtfully, 'Huh. Looks like you've grown yourself a pretty hefty dick there, fella’. Now, I have to admit I was pleased both by the observation, and the implication that I'd had some kind of pivotal role in the growth and cultivation of my own dick.

Unfortunately, he didn't stop there. He then said, 'Bet your dad has a pretty big dick too, huh?' And maybe it's just me, but I was slightly less into this. I was even less into what he said next, which was, 'God. Your poor mother'."

**

Things don’t stay the same, of course. Eventually, inevitably, they have to leave. And Richie does his best to prolong that wonderful, sticky nightclub feeling of self-confidence and uninhibited liberty by crowding Eddie up against the wall by the exit, while the others piss about getting their jackets, and putting both hands on Eddie’s face and kissing him. Eddie opens his mouth when it happens, like he’s expecting it, and they kiss lazily beneath the dim light by the back door, music from outside and inside all a faint throb in the distance.

It’s slow and sweet at first; Eddie tastes like whiskey and sugar and lime all at once. He threads a hand into Richie’s hair and and tilts his head, just slightly, and with the new angle his kissing becomes a little more bruising, a little urgent. When they break apart, though not by much, Eddie’s lips are cherry-red; Richie can tell even in the low light.

“Do you wanna…” Eddie starts, curling his fingers into the little gap between two buttons on Richie’s shirt.

“Yeah,” Richie breathes, utterly without the presence of mind to care about how shameless he sounds.

“Go for food, is what I was gonna say,” Eddie clarifies. Which is pretty mortifying. “I’m fucking starving, aren’t you?”

“I’m… I could eat?”

Eddie kisses him again, lightly this time, then says, “Cool. Let’s do it,” and ducks away to go and get his jacket from the cloakroom.

It’s not too difficult to tell the others he’s ditching. Bill isn’t wholly interested anyway; he’s one more bat of the eyelids away from scoring with one of the glittery aerialists. Beverly, as always, is a little more engaged about the situation.

“You and Eddie?” she says in a low voice, flashing, quite unironically, two thumbs up.

“I don’t know,” says Richie, out of earshot of Eddie. “Maybe. You and Ben?”

“I’m not sure. I think he thinks he’s being anti-feminist by asking if I want to sleep with him. It’s sweet. But it’s also kind of pissing me off.”

Stan, having retrieved his own jacket after a very long and arduous search for his cloakroom token, pops up between the two of them and says, “Well, I hope you both have a _ wonderful _ time.”

Richie winces. “Stanley. Honestly. Am I a terrible friend?”

“You’re completely hideous. But will I be sleeping in your bed tonight and eating the rest of your birthday cake? Oh yes, my friend. Yes, I will.”

“I’ll make it up to you. I swear I’ll take you to the most boring fucking museum in the whole city tomorrow.”

“Oh you,” says Stan, patting him on the cheek, “with your empty promises.”

Perhaps Richie ought to feel guiltier than he does, but like any man he is, on some level, inherently selfish and dissolute. He follows Eddie out of the club, into the dark early morning which seems to stretch ahead like a whole new night out. In the briefest moment of self-reflection, Richie crudely considers that if he had a tail, it would be wagging.

**

“I like Stan,” Eddie says, as they walk along together outside. The sky is no longer black but dark, waxy blue, though the streets are still buzzing and alive. “It was nice to finally meet the star of your stand up.”

“The star?” Richie echoes. “_I'm _the star. I don’t talk about him _ that _ much.” He pauses. “Do I?”

“All I’m saying is, for a guy I’ve only spent about thirty minutes talking to, I know an inordinate amount about his life. He was like, ‘Hi, I’m Stan’ and I felt like saying, ‘Let’s cut the small talk, man, I know you once cried so hard at _ Dancer in the Dark _ you had to call in sick to work’.”

Richie laughs. “Did I talk about that?”

“You don’t remember?”

“I don’t remember _ half _ the shit I use, man. If it doesn’t get a laugh, I never use it again. So I guess jokes about Lars Von Trier didn’t go down so well. Weird, huh?”

“That _ is _ weird. I mean, _ Antichrist _ is probably my favourite comedy of all time.”

“More of a romantic comedy, really.”

“So what’s the secret to being a successful stand up comedian, if it’s not that?”

“I don’t know,” Richie shrugs, hands in his pockets. “Still tryna figure that one out.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, his shoulder brushing lazily against Richie’s. “Spare me the false modesty, would you?”

“I’m serious,” Richie laughs. “I’m not exactly what you call high-flying, Eds.”

“Oh, so when people come in the bar and ask me ‘Hey, where’s Richie tonight?’ ‘Why’s Richie not performing tonight?’ ‘Everyone keeps telling me to come see this really fucking tall Richie guy’ they’re talking about some other, elusive, seven foot Richard?”

“It’s entirely possible.” Richie’s quiet for a moment. Then, uninhibited, he can’t help it: “Do people really ask that?”

“Sure. When the other performers suck,” says Eddie, and this time it’s deliberate when their shoulders touch, because Richie scoffs and nudges into him.

They seem to be walking for a long time without getting anywhere, and Richie can feel himself starting to emerge from the pleasant haze of drunkenness and into something else. He wouldn’t deem this new state sobriety; he’s still a little slurry-speeched, uncoordinated on his feet. But the alcohol’s magical numbing properties are beginning to wear off and he can feel his eyes starting to sting a little, the muscles in his legs beginning to ache.

“You know, there’s a McDonald’s, like, a block away,” he says.

“No,” Eddie says almost immediately, like he’s expecting it. “I don’t go to McDonald’s.”

“Oh. Are you… a vegetarian?” Richie asks, fairly certain he’s seen Eddie nibbling maple bacon Kettle chips on more than one occasion and wondering if this counts as meat.

“No. It’s just that McDonald’s is, like, a human Petri dish of bacteria. D’you know people have gotten infections in their heart-linings because of McDonald’s?”

“Oh. Well, no, I didn’t know _ that _ -”

“It’s a whole thing, bladder infections, skin infections…”

“- But we’ve just been in a club for like -”

“Sepsis meningitis, pneumonia…”

“ - two hours?”

“I know,” says Eddie, finally looking at him, “but I’m unaware of the results of any bacterial swab carried out at Elysium, so I can just use a straw and try not to think about, you know, potentially lethal pathogens.”

Richie blinks slowly. “I’ve had way too much to drink to process the kinds of words you’re using right now.”

Eddie’s preferred pathogen-free dining experience is a tiny little takeaway crammed at the bottom of a three-storey townhouse. It’s got one stainless steel counter, a tin ceiling, and a very brief, cash-only menu.

Richie’s used to cheap, noisy diners, sizzling and stinking of hot oil. This place is so sterile it’s hard to imagine anyone frying anything in here, so Richie’s surprised when they’re able to shove two boxes of fries with red salt across the counter with startling efficiency.

“We walked all the way here,” says Richie, “and you just wanted fucking… fries.”

There’s no space to sit inside, so they stand outside instead. Eddie looks at him and eats one singular fry in tiny bites, like a mouse. Then another. Beneath the early morning sky, which, barely perceptibly, has begun to lighten, with just the hint of a deep orange sun on the horizon, Richie can see Eddie properly now. His eyes are dark and starting to redden a little with tiredness; his hair is starting to curl slightly at the tips. He rubs one eye a bit with his free hand, and with the other gestures lazily to the box Richie’s holding.

“Just fuckin’ eat them,” he says.

“Fine,” says Richie. Then he concedes, “Alright, congratulations, they’re pretty fucking good.”

“And you won’t get sepsis from them.”

“That’s the real clincher.”

“Thanks for coming all this way with me,” says Eddie, resting his head back against the brick wall and glancing at Richie sideways. “Even if it was just because you hoped I might invite you back to my place.”

Richie chokes a little, partly on red salt, partly on shame.

“I wasn’t - I’m not -” How best, he wonders frantically, to insist that he isn’t a creep, without sounding like an utter creep?

“Which is fine, because I was going to anyway,” Eddie finishes, in a way that’s so calm, and so effortlessly confident, that he could be a character in a sultry Marlene Dietrich film, were it not for the way he’s fussily rubbing red salt from his fingers, instead of licking it like a normal person. “I’m about another, I don’t know, six blocks away. That cool?”

And even if sex, it seems, is on the table, Richie can’t help himself. “Seriously, Eddie?”

Eddie just laughs.

“Nah,” he says, and points to the building directly opposite them. “I live there.”

“Oh, good one, you really got me.”

“Would you still’ve come?”

Eddie’s smiling at him; a knowing, sort of sexy smile, which even coupled with slightly bloodshot eyes still sends a pleasant little shiver down Richie’s spine.

“There’s no point me lying, is there?” says Richie.

“Not really.”

“Then yeah. I would’ve. Happy?”

Eddie laughs again, like he’s pleased with himself. With his left hand he reaches for Richie’s face and holds him gently by the chin, and Richie thinks he’s going to kiss him when Eddie pulls him closer, and thumbs very gently at the tiny pearls of salt on Richie’s lower lip.

“You’re fucking… ridiculous, Richie, d’you know that?” Eddie grins, but somehow not like he _ means _ ridiculous. Like he means attractive, or interesting, or fucking A.

**

Eddie’s apartment is a little like his favourite takeaway, minus the tin ceiling: tiny, mainly white, and mostly empty.

_ Mostly_, because there’s still a TV, and a sofa, and a tripod lamp. It’s not Richie’s style at all, but he appreciates it as the kind of place you might want to lie down, on the big grey area rug on the floor, and meditate.

“You live alone?” says Richie, noting the stairs leading to a mezzanine with one double bed.

“Uh huh.”

Richie wants to pry, but refrains. Vaguely, he can recall Bill saying something about Eddie’s dad dying, when he was a kid maybe, and leaving him money. In this city, even a dead dad’s inheritance won’t bag much square footage, but it can sometimes afford someone the luxury of living alone. It’s a luxury Eddie seems to have squandered on minimalism and Marie Kondo rules. The only clear mark of personality is a torn-out shopping list on the counter of the kitchenette which just says ‘oat thing (one in the red box)’, ‘clorox’, and ‘BBQ mayo’. BBQ mayo has been underlined twice.

Eddie gets him a glass of water, which is ideal because the red salt has Richie spitting feathers, and he presumes there’ll be kissing soon, and he’s right, there is; he downs the glass, then half of another, and then they’re up against the counter kissing all warm and slow, Richie blindly trying to put the glass down behind himself without breaking it.

They move to the sofa, where the kissing becomes feverish, and slightly tenacious. Richie’s lying on his back, and Eddie’s pushing his head down against the sofa cushion, changing the angle to go deeper, then slowing down again, alternating the rhythm in a way that makes Richie slightly breathless. Eddie breaks away with a small noise and nudges his nose against Richie’s. In between smaller kisses he mumbles, “Do you wanna go upstairs?”

Which is a fine idea in theory, only the reality is that as soon as their bodies hit the mattress they slow right down, become boneless and sloppy with exhaustion, and although they try to pick up where they left off it’s Eddie who pulls away to whisper, rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand, “Can we just… for a second,” and he puts his head in the crook between Richie’s shoulder and neck and promptly falls asleep.

Richie’s not far behind. He drifts on the edge of consciousness, his eyes growing heavy, closing, then snapping open again when his body complains that there’s an attractive man on top of it and it can’t just be expected to go to _ sleep_.

But he can’t help it. He’s been awake for hours and hours and hours, and Eddie’s bed has the mother of all mattress toppers, and the alcohol has all but worn off now, leaving Richie aching, sleepy, a little stupid...

“_Fuck_.”

Eddie jolts awake, leaving a damp spot where his mouth has been. “Huh?”

“Sorry.”

“Did I fall asleep?” He sounds almost annoyed with himself. “You okay?”

“Contacts.”

“What?”

Richie gestures to his face, sitting up. “I’ve got my fucking… contacts in.”

“So?”

“So I can’t…” He’s going to say ‘stay’, but stops himself just in time, not wanting to sound presumptuous. It’s not like he’s been invited to stick around till morning, after all. He changes tack: “So I need to be careful I don’t fall asleep and accidentally blind myself. Are you _ laughing_? It’s not funny, I have incredibly poor eyesight.”

In the grey dawn light Eddie sits up in the middle of the bed, grinning, looking tousled and _ really _ stupid-beautiful.

“Just take ‘em out,” he shrugs. “I’ll make sure you get home safe. Hold your hand the whole way.”

“Fuck you,” Richie scoffs, dimly aware that of everything Eddie has said tonight, that’s somehow, inexplicably, the sexiest.

His fingers find the front of Eddie’s t-shirt and he pulls him in; just as Richie kisses him he touches his hand up beneath the t-shirt and sweeps his palm over Eddie’s stomach and around to his back, where he pushes the t-shirt up further, and it’s kind of hot the way his hand almost spans the width of Eddie’s lower back.

Eddie seems to have forgotten his exhaustion. Or at least, he’s merely treating it as a minor inconvenience as he eases himself forward into Richie’s lap, and tangles his fingers in Richie’s hair and kisses him stupid. When they come apart for breath Eddie nips very gently at Richie’s lower lip, panting a little. His hair’s a mess, lips a little swollen. It’s honestly wonderful. He hooks two fingers into Richie’s belt loops, and with his other hand pushes Richie’s chest until he’s lying down again.

Richie gives in and lets his head fall back against the pillow, just as he feels Eddie push his shirt up and begin pressing hot, open-mouthed kisses around his navel. Richie hauls himself up onto his elbows to watch, dazed, as Eddie makes short work of his belt and fly. The belt lands with a dull thud, buckle-down, against the carpet, his jeans are roughly tugged down just enough, and Richie’s last, semi-coherent thought before Eddie goes down on him is _ happy fucking birthday to me_.

The thing about sex with Eddie is that Richie is so hopelessly head over fucking heels that all he wants to do is touch him all over, everywhere, and at the same time not do anything that could even be slightly construed as disrespectful. This is to such an extent that when, at one point, Eddie looks up at him, eyes dark, and says, “You can pull my hair if you want,” Richie almost reacts by saying, “Oh, thank you.”

Richie’s starting to learn, now that they’ve done this a few times, that unlike a lot of the men he's had the reasonable pleasure of fucking, Eddie isn’t _ frantic _ when it comes to sex. He’s _ slow_. Works with precision. Almost stopping, then starting again. Like they have all the time in the world. He sucks a dick the same way he makes a cocktail, as if led by some self-imposed, almost artistic obligation to get it just _ right_.

And he does get it right. Extremely right. Despite Eddie’s penchant for leisurely sex, it really isn’t long at all before Richie comes, and all he can manage in the face of this is a rather unsexy, “Sorry. Fuck. D’you want...?”

Eddie rolls his shoulders lazily and stretches, says, “I won’t come,” in a matter-of-fact, entirely Eddie sort of way, then adds, around a yawn, “You can owe me.”

“Deal,” Richie mumbles, completely boneless.

“Take your contacts out,” Eddie reminds him. He gets up and pads off to the adjoining bathroom to brush his teeth, and when he comes back he gets under the covers and nudges his foot against Richie’s leg, hard, and says, “Take your fucking contacts out.”

So Richie gets up off the bed, legs a little like jello, and goes to Eddie’s bathroom to get rid of his contact lenses and splash cold water on his hot face. He puts a little toothpaste on his finger and rubs it around his teeth in lieu of a toothbrush, feeling his hangover start to creep up on him before he’s even gone to sleep, a dull little throb beginning to peek from behind his eye.

When he goes back to bed, Eddie is curled up beneath the covers, eyes closed. He opens them when Richie gets in next to him.

“Sorted?”

“Sorted.”

“Goodnight, then,” he says softly, voice a little muffled by his pillow.

Richie rolls to face him. “It’s, like, 5am,” he says, tugging one of the too-many pillows out from beneath his head and tossing it to the end of the bed. Beneath the covers, his knuckles brush Eddie’s, and Eddie curls a finger around Richie's and gives it this tired little tug.

“It is?” Eddie murmurs, and then he sighs, and lets go of Richie's hand to pull his duvet up to his face. “Fuck. Alright. Good morning, then.”

“Good morning, Eddie,” Richie says, before closing his eyes, and falling asleep more instantly than he means to.


	6. Chapter 6

“I’m definitely an extrovert. I mean, there’s always been a positive correlation between my mental well-being and the amount of attention I’m being given. And yet despite this, I find it difficult to be truly emotional in front of other people. And I already know why this is, I don’t need a therapist to tell me it’s because I have profound daddy issues. But, like, those are issues which also make me super kinky so, you know. Swings and roundabouts.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t cry. Oh, I cry. I just have the decency to do it on my own time, and not subject others to the abject horror of being in the presence of somebody fucking snivelling. Because I’m not selfish.

Which is good, because frankly I am an _ ugly _ crier. Like, fucking disgusting. Think: The Toxic Avenger. Like you remember that one kid in middle school who’d get forced to do cross country and cry so hard he’d throw up? Here he is now. It’s me.

I remember once being at home over winter break when I was in college, and my boyfriend at the time broke up with me over text. Which was a lot harsher back then because you didn’t have like, quite so many little emojis to soften the blow. You know, you couldn’t just throw an innocuous fucking peace sign at the end of everything. I think his exact words were: ‘I’m out. Get over it’. But if he _ had _ been able to send an emoji with that, it definitely would have been that laughing-crying one?

Anyway, so _ I _ wasn’t laughing-crying, I was just crying-crying. I was in my dad’s car, driving to Little Caesars in the snow to get Crazy Bread for my pregnant sister, and I was _ sobbing_. And I _ mean _ that. This was not serene, slowly trickling silent tears on a night drive. I’m talking heaving my guts out in the middle of the day while sitting in standstill Christmas traffic in the centre of town.

And maybe at that point there was some kind of internal battle going on between my emotional issues and my innate instinct to perform, because, no word of a lie, despite the absolute trauma I was experiencing over my first heartbreak, the instant that Gwen Stefani’s ‘Hollaback Girl’ came on the radio, I started singing? Just to clarify, I didn’t stop crying to sing. The hideous crying was a kind of syncopated accompaniment, if you will. It was pretty jazzy. I got as far as ‘this shit is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s’, just completely fucking bawling and snot-faced, before I kind of folded in on myself and let my head hit the car horn. You know, just as a kind of nice, long final note.

So. All in all, I think I took the breakup pretty well.”

**

Eddie keeps his promise and walks Richie home the next morning. It started raining horribly around dawn and still hasn’t stopped, so the gesture feels extra sweet. It isn’t far, but they’re both hungover, so it means a lot when Eddie pulls a t-shirt on, bleary-eyed and messy-haired, and says, “Alright, let’s get your blind ass home, shall we?”

He lives near the subway station, and as they sit together in the car which, for a Sunday morning, is suspiciously empty, he asks, “Is your eyesight, like, _ really _ bad?”

The car lurches, and with it Richie’s fragile stomach. He groans.

“My eyesight?” he says, pinching his aching forehead with two fingers. “Yeah, I guess it’s pretty awful.”

“Since when?”

“Since, I don’t know… I’ve always had glasses.”

“Even as a baby?”

Richie looks at him. “No, Eddie, I didn’t have glasses as a baby.”

“I knew someone who was born with water on his brain and he had glasses when he was a baby.”

“I didn’t - I wasn’t born with water on my brain.”

The car rattles loudly, and Richie just about possesses the presence of mind to be annoyed that he can’t focus on enjoying the way they’re sitting together, knees touching, and how if someone looked at them they might think they were a couple. He can only focus on his desperate need for his toothbrush, a shower, and his bed, in that order.

“You’re lucky you suit glasses,” says Eddie. “That’d suck if you didn’t, huh? I think you look okay without them, but you’re cooler to look at when you have them on.”

Richie’s noticed this before, this city boy habit Eddie has of giving backhanded compliments. It had been one of the things Richie liked most about him when they first met; not the backhanded compliments so much as what they were borne of, which is a seemingly innate inability to bullshit people.

That said, it also puts Richie a little on edge, because it means if he tells a bad joke, or wears an awful shirt, or looks better with his glasses on, Eddie will just tell him. Richie had been working once not long ago when Eddie and Bill were sharing a shift. At the bar, he’d overheard Bill ask, “Do you think I should try to get that girl’s number? The one with the unbe_liev_able blue dress?” and Eddie had replied, without a hint of brotherly joviality to suggest he was joking, “Uh. No, I wouldn’t bother.”

They get off at Richie’s usual stop, and though muscle memory carries Richie most of the way he can’t say he isn’t pleased when every so often, usually when they’re pausing at a busy corner to cross the street, Eddie will gently steer him by the back of his arm. By the time they’re at Richie’s building the rain’s let up, but they’re both wet through.

“I feel horrible I made you walk in the rain with me,” says Richie.

“Yeah, you should. I’ll probably get pneumonia now, so thanks,” Eddie says, with no bite. He puts his hands in his pockets and flashes Richie a half-smile. “Just remember to bring your glasses next time.”

Richie stands there with one hand on the bar of the front door, not sure what to do next.

“Do you wanna come in? I could get you a towel? So you don’t, you know. Die.”

Eddie smiles, properly now. “You don’t have to pretend like you’re not dead on your feet, Rich. I know _ I _ am. So I’m gonna go home, run a painfully hot bath, and sleep in it. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Uh, well -”

“At work?”

“Right! Yeah. Absolutely.”

Richie wonders if it would be right to kiss him. He quickly concedes that it probably wouldn’t, though he isn’t sure why. It’s strange; last night he couldn’t _ stop _ kissing him. Fast forward five hours and suddenly they’ve lurched into a whole new world where the only appropriate options now somehow feel like a hug or a fist bump.

They settle on a hug, and when Eddie’s gone Richie pushes on the heavy door with his shoulder, which is aching and weak, and stumbles towards the elevator. He feels, rather than sees, the number 4 on the buttons.

He slouches into the apartment, and then his bedroom, and Stan, who’s in his bed, says brightly, “_There _ he is,” and immediately launches into a plodding rendition of the theme from The Newlywed Game.

“Please don’t sing when I’m dying,” Richie groans. “It’s not proper.”

He picks his glasses up off the nightstand, puts them on, lifts back the covers and gets in next to Stan, pausing just long enough to toe his horrible boots off before flopping back against the pillow with a sigh. Then he takes his glasses off again.

“Could you get your big fucking leg off me?” says Stan, tugging the covers back towards himself.

“Okay,” Richie says, eyes closed, kicking him feebly under the duvet, “first of all, this is my bed. Secondly, if you’re naked, I’m gonna be mad.”

“It’s very comfy. I think I’ll stay.”

“Yeah? Have a nice night, did you?”

Stan pokes him, hard. “Did _ you_?”

“Very pleasant, thanks.”

“Good, I’m glad. We both had great nights, then. You were out getting laid, I was lying here at four in the morning while your neighbour’s fire alarm went off for an hour. When I asked Bev if we should do anything, she said it ‘happens all the time’ and you guys never go round there or say anything because you’re ‘afraid of getting knifed’?”

“Exactly. And that’s solid advice you can take with you anywhere, Stanley.”

They lie there for a moment, the traffic rattling loudly down below, and Richie’s just debating whether or not he has the strength to get aspirin from the bathroom when Stan says, “So are you going to give me any details, or..?”

“Do you _ want _ details?”

“I just want to know if you cried, threw up, or made any love confessions.”

Richie counts on his fingers. “No, no, and nearly.”

“That’s pretty good for you!”

“Fuck you,” says Richie, kicking him again. “He let me stay over, so we’re basically engaged.”

“Can I be your best man?”

“I guess so.”

“Can we have the bachelor party at Six Flags?”

“What is your obsession with Six Flags?” Richie snuggles further down into the duvet, and Stan does the same, so they’re lying face to face, like they’re ten again. “I think I’m in love, Stan. It’s very painful.”

“I’ve heard it’s supposed to be. What are you going to do about it?”

Good question, Richie thinks. What _ is _ he going to do about it? It’s only as he’s lying there, Stan watching him expectantly, that he realises what Eddie actually said to him earlier.

“Just remember to bring your glasses next time.”

Next time.

_ Next time_.

**

So this is what happens: on Wednesday night, Richie stays with Eddie on the close-down after a gig, and they go back to Eddie’s for a night cap, and they end up having sex.

Then the following Sunday, Richie asks if Eddie wants to come over to watch _ Wild Wild Country _ on Netflix because Bev isn’t in and he doesn’t think he’ll concentrate if he watches it alone, but they both seem to share an unspoken understanding that they won’t be watching _ Wild Wild Country _ at all, they’ll be having sex, and they’re right, they don’t watch it, and they do have sex.

This happens several more times (and not always with a documentary-based ruse, it has to be said), and it’s at this point Richie is able to admit to himself that where before there was nothing, they’ve now established something.

“So it’s pretty much just sex?” Beverly says, when Richie tries to explain it to her.

“No,” he says, even though, largely, it is.

It’s not like they don’t talk in _ between _ the sex, and it’s not like it’s always _ full _ sex, and it’s not like Richie doesn’t sometimes look at Eddie, sleeping next to him afterwards (always under a big mess of blankets, his head just a tuft of dark hair peeking out the top), and feel like his heart is trying to pummel its way out through his chest.

“I see,” is Beverly’s somewhat dry response. “Well, it sounds very promising.”

Richie tries not to mind that Beverly doesn’t support his new and frankly exhilarating venture. It doesn’t seem very fair when she was the one who was encouraging him to sleep with Eddie in the first place, all those weeks ago at that stupid birthday party, only now that he’s doing it regularly it’s somehow a problem? It’s like when she showed him how to reheat chicken and rice using damp paper towels, and now she gets mad every time he microwaves leftover Chinese takeout.

He says as much, and she rolls her eyes.

“Richie,” she says, a bit sternly.

“What?” he says.

“Be _ careful_.”

But he can’t help it. He doesn’t want to be careful. It feels like something good is finally happening to him. It’s bliss, it’s exciting, it makes him feel _ happy_. Genuine, lush happiness, almost metamorphic in its ability to make Richie want to do and be better. He blitzes the apartment, chucks out the wine-stained rug and the fucking ficus. Buys new bedding and underwear, and new aftershave he can't really afford.

And this is the thing, this is the _ thing_, Beverly; it’s not just physical.

Alright, it is for the most part, but sometimes it’s so profoundly _ intimate _ too that Richie feels like he’s in some beautiful French film, like that weird one Eddie put on one night about the wannabe criminal and the girl with the pixie cut, all cigarette smoke and white bed sheets and wonderfully pretentious conversations. One morning he watches as Eddie pads about in just his boxers and Richie’s t-shirt, mindlessly peeling an orange, licking juice from his thumb beneath this dappled spring sunlight, and Richie isn’t thinking anything in that single, wonderful moment except maybe _ oh Christ_, and _ that hurts_, and _ this could be a fucking French film_.

And what about last week, Tuesday night, Eddie’s panic at finding what _ he _ called a tumour, and Richie called an ingrown hair, on his stomach? With seemingly no mind for the sheer lack of sex appeal involved, he hoiked his t-shirt up and insisted Richie check it out and give him a firm diagnosis, as though Richie were perfectly qualified to do so.

“I mean, it’s an ingrown hair, Eds, I get them all the time.”

“It’s_ solid_, though. Look - feel!”

“It’s a fucking ingrown pube, okay, I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“Why would I have pubic hair _ there_, asshole?”

“Because you get pubic hair on your stomach! You may have noticed over the years that it doesn’t just stop at the top of your dick.”

“Yeah, up _ here_ maybe, in a _ line _ \- it doesn’t just decide to fuck off North-East when it feels like it, Rich.”

And what’s checking out each other’s pimples if not intimacy?

Once or twice they stand at the sink and brush their teeth at the same time, and if movies have taught him anything it’s that _ that _ has to count for something, too.

And whereas before Richie could only glean the things he liked about Eddie from work and parties, now he has a whole new private world to catalogue: the way Eddie snuffles and mumbles in his sleep, puts his face in his hands when he’s tired, rubs his thumb slowly over his nose when they lie on the couch, like he’s trying to soothe himself to sleep. The way he hates having his ears touched, and shifts his weight from foot to foot when he’s washing dishes, or making coffee. And how he’s allergic to tomatoes, but they won’t kill him so he still eats salsa and then complains all night about his mouth tingling. He starts play fights he has no hope of winning. He has an impossibly high score on the Tetris app on his phone, and plays it so regularly he often gets the theme music stuck in his head, which annoys them both. He’s direct and brash and a bit bossy, especially in bed, and sometimes he curses like he forgets other adjectives exist.

But he’s kind too, and practical, and funny, and he gets upset by ASPCA ads on TV, and sometimes, usually when he’s on the brink of sleep, he’ll tangle his feet up with Richie’s at the end of the bed, or squeeze the top of his arm just briefly, and it won’t last more than a few seconds before he rolls to the other side of the bed but it’s still nice, and these are only little things but Richie likes knowing them, and he likes feeling so stupid in love.

Beverly says that it isn’t love, it’s infatuation, and that she isn’t trying to be cruel but he should know the difference.

“It’s like you think you’re lucky he even notices you,” she says.

And he says, “Well, I _ am_.”

So the month passes by in this wonderful blur, and they never really talk about what it is they’re doing, and they never go so far as to leave a toothbrush permanently at the other’s apartment, but in between the sex there’s Chinese takeout and Turner Classic Movies and long, pointless conversations held top-and-tail on the sofa. The only time they come close to putting a name on it is one extremely lazy, hot Sunday in April, when neither of them have to work. They’ve been making out for some time in Richie’s bed, slow and lazy, sheets everywhere, when Eddie finally rolls on top of Richie, half-hard and grinding down on him, pulling this stupid, needy noise from the back of Richie’s throat. Richie squeezes the top of his thigh where it’s slung over him, and he’s just about to get something started when Eddie says, entirely too conversationally, “What do you think about this arrangement? Do you think it’s going well?”

He sounds sort of like a manager at an employee performance review. This is another of Eddie’s habits Richie has become accustomed to over the past few weeks. Just as in day-to-day life, mood or context means very little to Eddie when he has something on his mind, and that's including during, before, or after sex. It’s a combination, Richie thinks, of being a New York native, and working nights in a rowdy bar. He’s developed social conventions that facilitate serving hordes of terrible people all night, so there’s simply no room for euphemism.

And in response to this direct approach, Richie, for some Godforsaken reason even he can’t fathom, tries to match it by saying, “Uh, I’d give it, like… I don’t know, eight out of ten?”

Eddie frowns. “_Eight _ out of ten?”

“I don’t know, you framed the question like it warranted some kind of ranking system.”

“Okay, well, I wasn’t asking for a score, Richie, but as you’ve given one, in which area are you thinking we could make up these two points?”

“Alright, _ nine _ out of ten.”

“No, no, you said eight, let’s stick with eight.”

“So just to be clear, you think our current situation is _ ten _ out of ten?”

This seems to throw Eddie slightly. “Well, I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.” He pauses, drumming his fingers absently against Richie’s abdomen. “I guess there’s always room for improvement.”

Richie nods. “Maybe we could talk about that at our next team meeting? You could wait till I’m actually _ inside _ you for that one.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Fuck off,” he says, anchoring Richie’s wrist to the bed and kissing him again.

They stumble from the apartment the next morning, bleary-eyed, and it seems frankly preposterous that they’ve been hooking up - ‘seeing each other’ Bev calls it, in an oddly quaint, vaguely British sort of way - for a month now, and Richie’s never exposed Eddie to the culinary wonders of Screamin’ Beans.

It’s in part due to Eddie’s reluctance to eat anywhere that he can’t fully vet on TripAdvisor first, but he seems satisfied that it isn’t revolting when they go in, and he’s evidently charmed by Mike, who takes their order, if his dopey grin is anything to go by. It’s a common effect Mike tends to have on people, and one Richie’s not too concerned by.

“So do you come here because it’s outside your apartment, or did you rent your apartment because it’s outside here?” asks Eddie.

“Any and all living arrangements I make are based on proximity to my favourite diners, yes,” Richie nods. “No, I mean, it’s weird. You think when you move to a big city you’re gonna spend all your time eating in these really eclectic, bohemian places, and the truth is I either come here or a terrible ramen place, like, two blocks away. You know the town I grew up in had _ one _ independent restaurant? And all they served was hot dogs and mozzarella sticks, and Stan’s Jewish, so we couldn’t even go.”

“You couldn’t eat hot dogs and mozzarella sticks with anyone else?”

“Don’t make the mistake of underestimating how much of a loser I was as a child, Eddie. If I went up to another kid and asked if they wanted a Roller Derby Diner hot dog, I’d’ve probably gotten a roundhouse kick to the face.”

“That could be your TripAdvisor review: ‘Hot dogs so bad they make you wanna roundhouse kick someone in the face’.”

Their food arrives, and Eddie slides his phone out of the way. It vibrates with a message, which he ignores.

“I was more or less a loser in school too,” he admits.

“I mean, that’s not really a surprise,” says Richie.

Eddie quirks an eyebrow. “It’s not?”

“Well, you have a personality. And a sense of humour. No one popular ever comes out of high school with a personality or a sense of humour. They come out of high school thinking Friends is funny.”

Eddie laughs and, thankfully, seems somewhat pleased by the comment. He starts talking about how, after his dad died, he was never allowed to do anything; go on field trips, or attend sleepovers, or go trick or treating, or dissect a frog in Biology, or watch any cartoons on MTV. He became a social outcast by being confined to his bedroom and Disney films, although he wasn’t allowed to watch _ The Aristocats_, because his mom thought it was too sexy.

And Richie, who already knows from Bill that Eddie’s dad is dead, has to pretend like he doesn’t.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” he says. “That’s really sad.”

“I mean, people say that and they get weird about it, and I guess it _ is _ sad. But I don’t remember him so I’m not cut up about it. I think that somehow makes people feel even weirder. Do you still have both your parents?” Eddie frames the question in the blunt way only Eddie would.

Richie blinks. “Uh, yeah. Well, I think so. Haven’t spoken to them in a while!” Then, feeling he ought to clarify: “We’re not weird or anything, they just struggle with FaceTime.”

Eddie’s phone buzzes again. This time, Richie notices what he thought he saw the first time, which is a little red flame in a white box at the top of the screen. Eddie doesn’t even look at it as he deftly switches his phone to silent, and puts it in his pocket. Richie isn’t sure what to read into more: the Tinder notification, or the fact that Eddie put his phone away to talk to him. Surely the latter says more than the former, but maybe that’s wishful thinking.

“And they live in Maine?” Eddie says swiftly, like the conversation never stopped.

“For some reason, yeah.”

“Why did you leave?”

“Because I wanted to go to college here.”

“What did you study?”

Richie's still trying to shake off niggling thoughts of the phone message, and isn't really thinking when he says vaguely, “Something pointless, trust me. I didn’t graduate.”

Eddie considers this, picking a fork out of the cutlery tray and checking it for marks. “So are you doing what you wanna do now?”

It’s not the question Richie expects, because usually the question people ask is ‘what possessed you to drop out?’.

He tries to think of a suitable answer, but his mind goes blank.

“In some form,” he eventually decides. “I don’t know, I guess I always have this feeling I could or should be doing something else with my life, but the universe isn’t telling me what it is. Like there’s some big secret I’m not in on. I could be a spectacular retail manager and we’d never know.”

“Unless you got a job as a retail manager.”

“I don’t know, I get the feeling that’s _ not _ what the big secret is. I prefer to think of it as something more like ‘you should be writing a memoir’ or ‘buy more lottery tickets’.”

“If that’s what you want it to be, why don’t you just do it?”

“That’s a good question. I don’t know. There’s just something sort of mildly paralysing about your twenties, isn’t there?”

“Don’t I know it,” says Eddie. “I’ve worked in bars for forever. No one knows career paralysis quite like me.”

“Okay, what would you do, then? If you could do _ anything_?”

“Anything?”

“_Any _-thing.”

“Anything, God. I don’t know. Just something that makes me happy, I guess,” and Eddie’s voice when he says it is so soft, and the sentiment is so touching, that Richie’s about to say something equally profound when Eddie suddenly grabs Richie’s arm and adds, “_Or _ I’d be a Lego sculptor. They make, like, forty grand a year just building shit at Legoland. Like I said, I never left the house as a kid, I’d be _ killer _ at that. And d’you know what _ else _ is a real job...?”

At this point, Richie isn’t even eating his breakfast. He’s sitting with his chin on his fist, lips slightly parted like an idiot, thinking that Beverly must be wrong; he must be in love. Because for twenty-seven years he hasn’t been able to shut up, but now all he wants in the world is for Eddie to just sit in front of him, like this, with his wonderful eyes and his wonderful hands and everything, and talk, and talk, and talk.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long to post. As you may be aware, Christmas happened and my god what a palava that was.

“I love this city, but it’s so fucking expensive. And I have this fear that I’ll never be able to afford to live alone, unless I settle for one of those studio apartments where, like, the trash compactor is also the bed? Luckily I have a really great roommate. I’m a gay man, so she’s a heterosexual woman, obviously. You know, it’s 2019, but we still live in a world where we find the thought of two gay male roommates living together just a _ little _ off, right? I used to have a friend who was a lesbian and her roommate was a straight man. Is it me or is that a little fucked up? I don’t know, every time I went to their apartment I felt like I was in the red room in _ Twin Peaks_. Like earthly laws just did not apply.

The thing is, it would make more sense for me to have a male roommate. Because then, more than likely, I wouldn’t have a roommate who uses my Gillette Fusion5 to shave their legs. You know? Best a man can get? Not in our fucking apartment it’s not.

No, she’s great and I don’t want to reduce her to a stereotype. But I do think there’s some truth in the idea that women are just a lot more emotionally complex than men, and that means they cry more… easily. Case in point: I came home the other day, she was crying. I asked: why? She said it was because she’d gotten out of breath jogging up the stairs to our apartment.”

**

“Renewal’s due on the lease,” Beverly mumbles, crunching toast. “Rent’s going up by 5%.”

“Fuck,” Richie says, only half listening.

“I know, those assholes. We could try telling them we’ll move unless they settle on a reduced rent with us.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, that’s what I did at my last place.”

“Okay. We’ll do that.”

“That’s if we want to keep renting together."

Richie looks up from reviews of himself on Twitter, attention finally caught.

“What?” he says.

Beverly wanders over to the kitchen and dumps her chipped breakfast plate in the sink, dusting her hands off on her dressing gown. “Well, I got them to lower the increase on my last place. But still. I _ was _ only twenty-two, it was all very Erin Brockovich of me, I thought.”

“No, what was the other thing you said?” Richie puts his phone down on the table.

“Huh?” she says lightly.

“‘If we want to carry on renting together'?”

“Yeah.”

_ “If _ we want to?”

“Right.”

“As opposed to what?”

Beverly looks at him, then around herself, as though someone else might be standing there with an answer.

Eventually she tightens the cord on her bathrobe a little uncertainly and says, “As opposed to… not… wanting to carry on renting together?”

Richie stares. “You don’t wanna rent with me anymore?”

“Of course I do,” Beverly says, like it’s obvious.

“Then why ask the question?”

“Because you might not wanna live with me anymore, Richard? So I thought I’d better check with you on that one before we agreed to a 5% increase on rent?” She picks the letter from the Real Estate agents back up off the table, flapping it for effect.

“I thought we were Erin Brockoviching the rent increase?” says Richie.

"Well, hopefully! If that’s what you want to do!”

“It is!”

“Good! Fine!” She starts pretending to wash the dishes, for something to do. “I don’t understand why you have to be so tetchy. It’s a goddamned Saturday in spring.”

“Well, I ju - who else do you think I’m gonna live with? I don’t have _ friends_. What would I do if we didn’t rent together? Show up on the doorstep of The Salvation Army? With a bindle?”

“Oh my God,” Beverly murmurs.

She slaps down the dish cloth, wanders back to the table, sits down in front of him. She takes his hand in both of hers and gives it a little squeeze; Bev code for ‘shut up’.

“Richie, I _ love _ living with you. I love that you don’t judge me before I’ve showered. I love that you say ‘Alexa, play ‘It’s Tricky’’ at least four times a day. I love when we go grocery shopping at two in the morning and just buy wine and peanut brittle. But Rich?”

There it is again, the barely perceptible hand squeeze.

“Realistically, we’re not going to live together forever. And, honey, I think that’s something you need to be thinking about.”

**

At half past eleven on a Saturday night, in precisely the same way he’s done five hundred times before, Richie stands backstage at Cask and watches from the wings, waiting for tonight’s headliner to finish sweating through his fifteen-minute set.

He dares glance at his phone for a brief moment and Dan, shouldering past him with a box of raspberry wine coolers, huffs, “I pay you to text?”

“Not on time,” Richie shoots back.

He senses, rather than sees, Dan roll his eyes. Briefly, he stands beside Richie, short and wide in his regulation jeans and slogan tee. He watches the stage, considering, with clear admiration, Jimmy Navarro. Tonight's headliner. A baby boomer buffoon of a man with a big dumb beard and big dumb shirts, and too many jokes about his wife’s menopause.

“This guy’s great,” Dan says in a stage whisper, adjusting the awkward box in his arms. Richie watches him struggle. “Known him a long time. He used to perform at a club I owned in -”

“Idaho?” Richie interjects.

“Philadelphia, asshole.” Dan puts down the box altogether and stands next to Richie to watch properly.

“We're old friends, too,” says Richie. “He once told me I was so fey I could induce migraines.”

When the set's over, Dan picks the box of wine coolers up again and nudges Richie in the shoulder. “All yours, superstar,” he deadpans, slouching away.

Richie grabs Jimmy’s hand in a firm shake as they pass each other on stage, then explodes into the mic, “Jimmy Nav_arro_, everyone! What more do you _ need_?”

If hosting has taught Richie anything, it’s that he can will himself enthusiastic. He’s always had a flair for getting a crowd on side. He once managed to mount a mass uprising against his teachers in middle school, purely by standing on one of the cafeteria tables at lunch and announcing with convincing zeal that his Biology teacher was part of an organ harvesting cult.

Then again, with comics like Jimmy, Richie doesn’t have to do much to win the audience over. In fact, guys like Jimmy make Richie work even harder, because weekend audiences _ love _ guys like Jimmy, and they love the kind of crass, self-indulgent jokes guys like Jimmy tend to make. To make a slight against a guy like _ Jimmy _ would be to insult a whole drunken Saturday night congregation, and their tastes.

Richie’s own material does better with a different crowd - a _ younger _ crowd, he likes to think. A respectable Tuesday or Thursday night crowd of students and urbane hipsters. The kind of people with the attention span necessary to appreciate his long, neurotic, therapist’s sofa stories about terrible relationships and chronic internal discomfiture.

He’s been reviewed properly only a handful of times, and in the latest was described in the sub-heading as a comic who ‘toes a capricious line between feverish, puerile energy and sudden baffled introspection’. Whether or not the review was intended to be positive, Richie still isn’t entirely sure.

He never really understood what puerile energy meant, but maybe it’s this; maybe it’s saying to the packed, drunk Saturday night crowd, “Jimmy Navarro, everyone, what more do you need? A lobotomy, perhaps?”

Richie pauses and waits for the laugh. But there’s no laugh, just an awful silence.

Then a single, loud, “HA!” from the back of the room, and when Richie looks beyond the vast ranks of frowns, he sees Eddie, at the bar, hand clapped over his mouth, sniggering.

**

“A lobotomy, Richie?”

Richie groans into his drink. Double whiskey and ginger.

“I don’t know, it just came out. I really can’t stand that fucking guy.”

“I mean, he’s for sure an asshole,” Eddie agrees. “Every time he performs here he whistles and clicks his fingers and says ‘I tell jokes here, what do I get for free?’ Oh, and whatever drink you give him, he asks for ‘a little extra love’ in it. Makes me wanna shrivel up and die.”

“Okay, I don’t feel so bad about it anymore.”

Eddie laughs. “You shouldn’t feel bad anyway. Guy’s a dick.”

Richie considers this. Idly, he knocks the ice cubes in his glass together. “No, I should,” he says finally. He takes a large swig of his drink, crunching ice. “He’s just doing this ridiculous fucking job like the rest of us, and hecklers and Twitter do enough shit-talking as it is without the host joining in.”

The bar’s quiet now the last of the open mic-ers have trickled out. Eddie’s starting to clean up, but he puts his dish rag aside for a second and looks at Richie thoughtfully.

“I thought you liked performing here?” he says.

“I…” Richie starts to answer before he’s even thought about it. “I do? I guess? I don’t know. I don’t know if I enjoy it or if I just know Dan’ll always give me work. I mean, I perform at other places but if the offer's for the same night and it’s a choice between a bringer show there and a headline spot here, I’m gonna go where they pay me. I mean, it’s fucking scary going to a new venue. Winning over a new audience. ‘Cause here’s the thing, Eddie, these people don’t _ wanna _ like you. They come to these things with their fucking claws out. You know, before I started doing this full-time, I had no idea that the scariest thing in the world could be a self-entitled Bachelorette party.”

“What did you do before you did this?” asks Eddie.

Richie scoffs a little, at the sheer memory of himself. “I did what everybody else does when they move here. Waited tables. Gave blood. Lost twenty pounds. Cried.”

“My God, we have so much in common.”

Richie laughs, and almost as quickly stops laughing. He’s hit by this sudden, crippling weight of something. “I’m so fucking over it, man,” he groans, rubbing his fingers over his eyes beneath his glasses. “I’m over not having any money. I’m over going home for Thanksgiving and being embarrassed to tell my family what I do for a living.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s _ dumb_. It’s fucking - it’s not even a job. I mean, it is. But not like… being an accountant is a job. Or a… shark wrangler.”

Eddie considers this. “Would they be more proud of you if you were a shark wrangler?”

“Somehow I think yes.”

“Well,” says Eddie, picking up the dish rag again, “for what it’s worth, _ I _ think what you do is very cool.”

“You do? It is?”

“I couldn’t fucking do it. I can’t get on a stage. I’d straight up die if I had to do karaoke. Even if it was something I knew all the words to like… Bennie and the Jets.”

“I _ love _ karaoke, man.”

“Of course you do. You’re like, the epitome of a karaoke person. Let me make an assumption about you.” Eddie leans over the bar conspiratorially. “You do karaoke… when you’re sober.”

Richie swallows, feeling somehow as though he ought to be ashamed. “It’s been known to happen.”

Eddie shrugs, picking up a glass to wipe down. “There you go. Karaoke Person. Stand Up Person. Completely different breed of human being. And if you’ve actually got the balls to figure out a way to pay the rent with that, then your family should commend you for it.”

Richie’s fairly certain that of all the times he’s most wanted to push Eddie up against a wall and kiss him, this is likely in the top five.

He doesn’t say this, obviously. He says, “I think the last time my family commended me for anything was when I guessed the value of an area rug on _ The Price is Right _ when I was, like, eleven.”

“That’s a very sad story that I hope isn’t true,” Eddie says flatly, before tipping the glass in his hand at Richie. “I’m gonna start closing down in a minute. Want another before I do?”

“Mm. Better not.”

“Are you coming to mine after?”

It’s the kind of casual question they’ve both started becoming accustomed to, but it still gives Richie a pleasant little knot in his stomach whenever Eddie asks.

“D’you mind?” he says, draining his glass. “Ben’s at ours _ again _ and I really don’t feel like third wheeling for the fourth night in a row. I was watching _ American History X _ last night and they just came… and sat with me. I don’t know if there’s any discomfort quite akin to trying to watch a two hour movie about a neo-Nazi while sitting next to a couple feeding blueberry lemon drop popcorn to each other.”

Eddie smiles. “Well, you’ll have to wait for me to finish here.”

“Want me to help?”

“Absolutely not. You’re a Karaoke Person. I’m a Cleaning Person. Let’s stick to our specialist areas.”

**

“I’m starving,” is the first thing Eddie says, when they walk through his front door.

He says this more or less every time they come back here after a night shift, and yet inevitably he ends up picking idly at half a bag of potato chips or nibbling from a bowl of dry cereal. He only likes Cap’n Crunch, which strikes Richie as a choice completely incongruous with Eddie’s utilitarian apartment and generally severe outlook on life.

He must really mean it tonight, though, because as he heads for the stairs, already out of his jacket and tugging at the hem of his t-shirt, Eddie asks Richie to order takeout while he showers.

“What do you want?” Richie calls after him.

“Anything,” Eddie replies, disappearing into the bathroom. “You know what I like.”

This is one of the positive effects Richie seems to have had on him. Whereas at the start of their relationship - if it can be called that, though the jury’s still out - Eddie would only eat from two thoroughly vetted and unexotic establishments, he has with some initial reluctance let Richie talk him into a new Chinese, a Greek taverna and, after some particularly committed pestering, an Eastern European breakfast house.

And like everyone, Richie is a firm believer in the idea that if you know and are trusted with someone’s takeout order, well, they’re more than a number in your little red book, right? “You know what I like”? Yes, Richie knows _ exactly _ what Eddie likes. Crispy chilli chicken, which he calls Squiggly Chicken. Seaweed. A bitching Singapore vermicelli. SmartWater. Crispy M&Ms. Long naps. Hoodies with thumbholes. _ Midnight Cowboy_. Blowjobs in the shower. You know, the _ important _ stuff.

“What did you get us?” Eddie asks, dropping down next to Richie in pyjama pants and a hoodie, hair all damp and curly from the shower.

“Don’t worry, Eds, I got all your white boy favourites. Snake head soup, sheep guts, some kind of bug on a stick.”

“Aw, you _ remembered_. What are we watching? Oh, Family Feud? No.”

“I _ like _ Family Feud.”

“I wanna watch something funny,” Eddie says, changing the channel and popping the lid on the vermicelli simultaneously.

“Family Feud _ is _ funny.” Richie sighs and reaches for his own food. “Besides, you haven’t had a funny enough night as it is? With funny old me?”

Eddie pulls a face, and hands him the remote. He never entertained Richie’s self-pity in the past, and surprisingly, embarking on a casual sexual relationship doesn’t seem to have changed that, which is a shame.

“Here, find some stand up for us. I don’t know anyone good,” he says. “I was only allowed to watch Rosie O’Donnell as a kid. And then she came out as a lesbian, and that was the end of my short-lived exposure to stand up comedy.”

“Well, lucky for you, _ my _ parents had absolutely no regard for fucking me up or exposing me to smug liberal-lefties mocking the establishment, so I’ve got _ plenty _ I could show you.”

Except it suddenly seems very important that he get it _ right_, and suddenly somehow embarrassing to like Bill Hicks. Liking Bill Hicks suddenly seems like the kind of thing someone stoned would say at a party, kind of akin to carrying around a copy of _ Infinite Jest_, or wearing a beret indoors.

And when Richie was fourteen, Bobcat Goldthwait screaming, “THANK YOU VERY MUCH, AHHHH!” into a mic for thirty straight seconds had seemed like the absolute pinnacle of golden comedy, but he’d shown the clip to Beverly once and she’d just looked concerned and asked, “Is he like this all the time?”

And even if Richie more or less stole Steven Wright’s joyless, lethargic delivery when he first started doing stand up himself, he’s pretty sure Eddie would agree that one liners are about as in vogue as Eddie Murphy’s homophobia.

Which leaves only George Carlin, because even if Richie has no idea what sort of stand up Eddie would find amusing, he knows at least one more thing Eddie likes: swearing.

They sit scrunched up at either end of the sofa, Eddie’s socked feet poking Richie’s knee. They’ve watched _ The Apartment_, _ Pretty Woman_, _ The Graduate_, _ Annie Hall_, _ Dirty Dancing_, all from this very sofa, and somehow none of those seemed quite so cosily romantic, quite so woozily sentimental, as George Carlin marching around on Eddie’s TV, listing people who ought to be killed. Eddie laughs, not frequently but always in good places, and honestly. When they pause to open a bottle of wine Eddie twists over Richie for the remote, freezing George mid-rant.

It’s usually around this point that someone’s hand will find its way into someone’s pants, but after Eddie’s got their drinks he clambers back onto the sofa, plants his head in Richie’s lap and says through a crunch of potato chips, “You know what I find amazing? You can record yourself singing or acting or playing the piano and watch it back and know that you’re objectively good, but you could go out on that huge stage to tell jokes and not know for sure if you’re funny until people are laughing. That takes _ balls_. Like… you’re going out blind.”

“I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” says Richie, absently brushing a stray curl from Eddie’s forehead. “I mean, I know I’m funny, regardless of whether or not people laugh at my jokes.”

Eddie tilts his head a little to look at him, upside-down. He looks slightly surprised.

“Let me re-phrase, because that kind of made me sound like a dickhead,” says Richie. “My stories are funny. How I deliver them, and to whom, dictates the number of laughs. You know, Sam Kinison used to go on stage, throw the mic stand at the wall behind him, and scream at the audience.”

“Like Axl Rose doing stand up.”

“It was fucking weird, and hilarious. If he didn’t do that, but he still told the same jokes, people wouldn’t laugh as much. Maybe they wouldn’t laugh at all.” He gestures at the screen, lazily, with his glass. “If _ George _ did that, you know, screamed and smashed shit up in the middle of ranting about environmentalism, people wouldn’t get it. But they’re both funny as fuck, and they know they’re funny as fuck before they come on stage. You’ve just gotta… find your own little corner of weird, and make it sincere, and people will - _ hopefully_, people will respond.”

“I liked that,” says Eddie.

“You liked that?”

“It was very nice.” He sits up, so he can sip his wine without dribbling. “So what’s your corner of weird?”

“Uh. Well,” Richie says slowly. “I try to be brutally honest. And I try not to make anyone laugh.”

“You try not to make anyone laugh,” Eddie repeats, like he might have heard wrong.

“Yeah, you know, ‘cause it’s like the more you ask for something, the less likely people are gonna wanna give it to you. So I just pretend like I’m talking to a friend who’s easy to please. Like Stan. He laughs at whatever dumb shit happens to me, I don’t have to beg for it. So if I don’t focus on trying to mold whatever embarrassing story I’m telling into a punchline and I just pretend I’m talking to a hundred Stans, it kinda… mitigates the terror of being eaten alive by strangers.”

Eddie considers this. He looks at Richie, frowning a little, the ghost of a smile on his lips. 

“So you’re telling me you don’t care, and you _ don’t _ want to be worshipped by millions, and that’s _ not _ why you do comedy?” he says.

“If you’re asking if I have a dysfunctional personality type, then probably yes.”

“I’m not sure that _ was _ what I was asking,” Eddie says, flipping onto his side to face him. “But thank you for clarifying.”

“So you’ve never performed anywhere?” asks Richie.

“Nope.”

“Not _ any_thing?”

“No.”

“Not even… bad slam poetry at an open mic night in college?”

“Weirdly specific, and also no. I’ve never had any interest in people looking at me. I’m happy to just be part of the faceless horde.”

“That must be nice,” says Richie. “I actually develop a rash if I don’t get attention after a certain amount of time.”

“I’m sure they have creams for that.”

“Oh, it’s more than that, I have to be heavily medicated. So, wait, you didn’t even do musical theatre in high school?”

“_ No _, Richie.”

“How else could you have figured out you were gay?”

“Freddie Prinze Jr. in _ She’s All That_.”

“What about Debate? You _ totally _ did Debate -”

“Richie. I did Computer Club and track.” Eddie lifts his hands up. “Are you getting a picture of the kind of kid I was now?”

“Track?” Richie laughs, after a pause.

“What’s fucking funny about that?”

“Nothing, you have great legs, truly. It’s just… I mean, you had to use your inhaler the other day because your shower was too hot.”

“I had a cold, asshole!”

“So did you have to wear the little shorts? When you did track? Little red shorts? Little sweatbands?”

“I notice you’re not asking many questions about Computer Club.”

“No, I’m definitely more invested in this intriguing track revelation. So, just to be clear, the shorts -”

Eddie cuts him off, taking Richie’s chin in his hand and squeezing a little to shut him up. “Change the subject?”

“Okay. Any other sporting endeavours you want to fill me in on?”

“No. I got hit in the face with a dodgeball and had to have my nose cauterized when I was nine. Mom freaked. That was the end of my wider sporting career.”

“Man, if I was banned from everything that’d given me a nosebleed, there’d be nothing left for me to do. I wouldn’t be allowed to cook. I wouldn’t be allowed to ride a bike. I wouldn’t even be allowed to have sex.”

“Very gross,” Eddie says decisively, lying back down in Richie’s lap, pulling his head down close to him, but not quite close enough to kiss him. “You’re kind of weird. In a good way.”

“Thank you for clarifying,” Richie murmurs, then feels movement down by his leg as Eddie scrabbles for the remote.

“Let’s finish this,” says Eddie, pressing play on the George Carlin video and pinging him back into motion, adjusting himself until his head is comfortable against Richie. “If I fall asleep on you, you’re just gonna have to put up with my head cutting off your circulation. Hope that’s cool.”

And for the first time in weeks, Richie’s heart doesn’t sing. His head doesn’t think elated thoughts about how his leg could frankly turn _ gangrenous _ before he’d move it from beneath Eddie. For the first time in weeks, Richie looks down at Eddie and doesn’t feel surprised to see him with his head like that, in Richie’s lap, uncompromisingly. And somehow, this feeling - for all that it’s quieter and gentler - is, to some degree, more wonderful.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for alcohol and I guess mentions of drugs? Extremely brief tho.

“My therapist told me that nearly all of my behaviour is performative, and that’s why I’ve never truly been happy. He could be right. I started smoking cigarettes when I was seventeen. I’d watched _ My Own Private Idaho _ forty-eight times, and I thought smoking would make boys like me the way I liked River Phoenix. It didn’t really work, so I just started shooting heroin instead.”

**

And then, of course, like so many of the things Richie tries to adore, he pokes it and prods at it until it just curls in on itself, wilting.

The problem with real life is that so much of it - no, _ all _ of it - requires such a lot of _ work_. Even the simple task of loving someone, or trying to be loved in return, or trying to distinguish between loving someone and just really, really liking them, or curating a version of yourself that someone else will really, really like, or love - all of that requires work.

And love is nothing like the arty films Eddie likes to watch where two listless souls meet and look deep into each other’s eyes and just know, without hesitation, there and then, that their hearts fit together like pieces of a puzzle.

When Richie and Stan were kids, Stan’s parents never let them play any decent board games. They were only allowed jigsaws, which Richie would become so frustrated with he’d end up jamming the wrong pieces into the wrong parts of the puzzle just to get it over with, so that a bird’s head would end up at the bottom of its wing, or a cloud would find itself stranded in the sea.

He’s had exactly three boyfriends in his life, and each one has been just like that: these big, arduous puzzles he hadn’t the attention span, or confidence, or smarts to figure out, so that gradually he’d back off until, inevitably, each relationship spiralled into chaos. He’d ask the wrong questions, give the wrong answers, become exhausted by the expectation that he was supposed to understand the most minute change in body language, as if the relationship should be built significantly on secret codes and facial expressions. His last boyfriend, just before breaking up with him, told him, “You just don’t listen to what I want.” And Richie had responded, “You’ve never once said clearly what it is that you want.” And his boyfriend had said, “I shouldn’t have to!”

And the only way Richie knew how to deal with this response was to turn it into a stand up bit, to ensure that everyone else found it as stupid as he did.

The problem with Eddie is that he’s not a boyfriend. He’s a boy who’s a friend, and there’s also sex involved. Which makes things a thousand times more complicated than a proper relationship because a proper relationship has boundaries and expectations and routines, but this - whatever _ this _ is - is becoming so confusing that the only way Richie can think to try to comprehend it is to write jokes about it, except that he can’t find a punchline.

One Saturday, a couple of weeks later, Richie calls him, one hand holding his phone, the other shoving an ill-advised 9pm slice of bread in the toaster.

“Are you working tonight? Do you wanna come over? Bev’s gone to get her toes eaten.”

“Aren’t _ you _ working?”

“Uh, no,” says Richie, trying not to sound worried. “Not tonight.”

“Bev’s doing _ what_?”

“I don’t know, man, she’s gone to one of those, like… fish spas? Where the fish eat your fee - anyway, my place is free if you wanna -”

“I thought those were banned because they were giving people Hep C.”

“...So if you wanna come over, then yeah my place is free.”

Silence. The toast pops up. Anxiously, Richie eats it straight away without bothering with butter or a plate.

“Are you still thinking about the Hepatitis C?” he asks eventually through a mouthful.

“Kind of.”

“Sorry. Would it help if I said she’d gone to yoga?”

“It’s Saturday night.”

“I’m pretty sure yoga isn’t restricted to weekdays, but -”

“No, I mean.”

“What?”

“Well.”

“What is it?”

“Well, don’t you wanna. I don’t know. Do something?”

“That’s why I’m asking if you wanna come round.”

“No, but.”

“What?” Richie waits. “Jesus, are you _ still _ thinking about the Hep C?”

“No, Richie, fuck,” says Eddie, even though he probably is. “Okay, just. I need a shower first, so. I’ll be there in… I don’t know. A couple of hours maybe.”

It’s not exactly a warm response, and Richie almost wants to tell him not to come if he clearly doesn’t _ want _ to.

When Eddie does come round, there’s something not quite right. He feigns interest in the TV, and at one point, seemingly unaware, he stares into space for a solid two minutes. When Richie leans over to try and kiss him, assuming the problem is that Eddie just wants him to get on with something, Eddie pulls away, offers the most meagre excuse for a stretch, and says, “I’m just, I’m pretty tired. Can we not?”

So if he doesn’t want to be in here watching Cajun Justice, and he doesn’t want to be in there having sex, Richie is a little clueless as to what else he can offer. If he’s supposed to be offering anything at all.

“Do you want a drink?” he asks, but this just seems to offend Eddie.

“Uh, not really?”

“I didn’t mean - I wasn’t saying you should loosen up or anything.”

“Yeah, I hope you weren’t.”

“I just meant there’s a bunch of White Claws in the fridge. I know you like a low calorie hard seltzer.” Richie pauses. “Okay, I mean. I fucking hate asking this question, but. Have I done something wrong?”

Which seems to trigger something in Eddie because when he looks at him, his expression has softened a little.

“No, you haven’t,” he says. He sounds sincere, and it should be okay, but Richie’s never been good at letting things go. So he just worries about it all night instead.

**

It’s like one day everything is fine, and then it hits Richie like a tonne of bricks that it isn’t, and he’s just been kidding himself that it is.

On Tuesday night, he takes Beverly to an open air cinema to see _ The Princess Bride_. She thinks _ The Princess Bride _ is overrated and campy and a little basic, and she only goes because it’s hot out, and Richie suggests if they get bored they can just get drunk and buy hot dogs from the old-fashioned street vendor who’s always there, and it’s only as he’s picking the jalapenos off his that he realises he could have just asked Eddie to come. He could have just fucking _ asked Eddie _ to come.

Richie isn’t completely obtuse; he knows they’re both frustrated by this apparent inability to do anything outside of the four walls of Eddie’s apartment, or even smaller four walls of Richie’s bedroom.

To go out and do something together - _ just _ them, without Bev or Bill or anyone - would mean something neither of them have the energy to put a name to, and sometimes it _ seems _ like Eddie is going to ask Richie to do something - to do something, that is, besides fuck, or watch movies, or order Hungarian crêpes - and then he stops himself, just as quickly, like he’s annoyed Richie hasn’t already asked first.

What had once seemed intimate and inspired has grown claustrophobic and somehow predictable. Even the sex, which was always pretty great, has begun to lack enthusiasm. Perhaps because it’s just always been there from the start, always an option, at times the only option. Christ, Richie wants to ask Eddie out _ properly_, but even when he gets the idea for it - and there’s no shortage of amazing things to do in the city; open air cinemas and wine festivals and concerts and markets - the stupid words don’t want to come. They get stuck in his throat, and Eddie will give him this expectant, slightly concerned look, like he isn’t quite sure what Richie’s going to come out with, and in the end it’s easier for Richie to just shut up.

On reflection, of course, Richie realises that he isn’t scared of asking the question. He’s just scared of being told no. And so Richie doesn’t ask the question at all, and thus never runs the risk of having his heart torn out and stuffed in a trash can.

“It’s better to have asked the question and been completely destroyed, than to never know the answer at all,” is Stan’s sage advice, when Richie goes to visit him in Rhode Island one weekend in May.

“That’s not the quote,” Richie replies gloomily, “and also, it’s not better at all.”

But Stan is only half paying attention as he sits next to him on the bus to Easton’s Beach, filling in a crossword. Stan is the smartest person Richie knows, but his relationship advice is and always has been lukewarm to say the least. In between tepid bits of advice, mostly built on clichés from movies, Richie also has to listen to, “_Avignon_. Noon. Five letters. Yucca?”

And then Stan says, suddenly, like it’s just occurred to him, “I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of things. You’re exhausting yourself over nothing. You should just try being honest.”

Which, Richie thinks, is not only ridiculous but entirely unhelpful.

And as he lies at the bottom end of Stan’s tiny double bed that night, wide awake while Stan snores quietly into his pillow up by the headboard, the truth - all scuffed and sheepish - finally rears its stupid head: beyond what he’s already offered, Richie hasn’t anything else he can _ give _ to Eddie.

Anything Eddie would want, anyway.

“What’s in it for me?” Eddie might ask, if Richie were to suggest they make this _ thing _ into something _ more_.

And ‘what’s in it for Eddie’ is a question whose answer Richie isn’t entirely ready to acknowledge.

**

His mother rings when he gets back from visiting Stan, which is always unsettling. Richie answers apprehensively.

“Why are you sending me emails at 4am asking for money?” she says, in lieu of ‘hello’.

“I didn’t ask you for money,” he says. “And I don’t think I’ve sent an email since 1998.”

“You know what I mean. You sent me a message on The Facebook. At four in the morning.”

“And I asked for money?”

“You said that me asking you to come to your sister’s engagement party next month was the equivalent of asking you to choose between a train ticket to Maine and not having to dumpster dive for a month. Are you dumpster diving, Richie?”

“Not when I’m sober. That was a joke, by the way. You don’t have to tell Dad. Anyway, how was that me asking for money?”

“I’m not stupid, Richie, I can read between the lines.”

“There were definitely lines to be read between, I agree, but I think there’s been a slight misinterpretation. I wasn’t saying I need you to send me money. I was saying I can’t think of anything less conducive to my emotional well being than attending Holly’s fourth engagement party.”

“Oh good, thanks a lot. Now I owe your father five dollars.”

“Why?”

“We had a bet that you couldn’t go one phone conversation without making an unnecessary joke about your sister.”

“Jesus, don’t bet on me, I’m your son.”

“I was on your side!”

“Thanks, Ma.”

“I’ll send you the money you need to get here, but it’s on one condition.”

“I’m not bringing Stan as a plus one. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you we’re not dating. I get it, you like his polo shirts and you think he makes charming Pierogi -”

“_Actually_, if you'd let me talk, Richie, _actually_ I was only going to say that I want you to make yourself a Link-In profile.”

“I think you mean LinkedIn. Do you mean LinkedIn?”

“That’s what I _ said_.”

Richie pauses, waiting for the punchline.

“Why would I do that?” he says, when it doesn’t come. “So I can reconnect with all the charmers in high school who called me Flaming Dick?”

“No one called you that,” his mother says uncertainly. “Listen, you put in your skills on your profile and companies can headhunt you for jobs.”

“I already have a job matching my skills.”

“Yes, but you have plenty of other skills you could utilise and invest in a career - a _ second _ career - that might give you more security. Or at least a pension. Look, Richie, you competed in the American Mathematics Competition when you were fourteen and I think that’s something you ought to remember more often.”

“It’s not that I don’t remember it, Mom, it’s just that I’m painfully aware that that particular activity in part contributed to the aforementioned nickname. If we could stop pretending AMC 10 is my crowning glory, though, that’d be great. I’d hate to think I peaked when I still had braces.”

The problem is that for his mother, AMC 10 really _ is _ her son’s crowning glory. It’s humiliating for her to have to tell other people that her adult son is a stand-up comedian. In many ways, his brief career as a teenage mathlete, and the possibility that he might take up residence with Stan one day, is all she has to cling to.

She came to visit once - only once, and never again - with Richie’s father, and while they’d seemed reasonably pleased that he was living in his own apartment in which nothing appeared to have ever been set on fire or had a hole punched into it, they’d been unsettled by his artsy, raffish friends, and the multicultural city, and the cost of everything, and since then they’ve (optimistically) viewed his time here as only temporary; a childish whim that’s lasted just a little too long. Every time he speaks to his father, which isn’t a lot, he offers Richie a job as a dental assistant, a suggestion which is always eagerly succeeded by, “You don’t even need any qualifications!”

Until now it hasn’t been difficult to prove to them that he _ can _ make a living as a comic. When the bookings are there, when things are going well and he’s being offered gigs and not having to ask for them, and he’s building a name and people are talking about him, and (_very_) occasionally even recognising him, he’s on _ good _ money. At one point, he was even _ saving _ money, which was quite exhilarating.

But complacency has led him to a reliance on Dan he never intended. When Dan suddenly stops booking him, around mid-June, it’s like being fired from a real job. His savings start to trickle away as he takes shabby after-midnight bookings at The Black Box and Sal’s Comedy Gym and 99 Club, and when Richie finally goes in to Cask to confront him about it, on a whim on his way home from Eddie’s one morning, Dan’s infuriating response is as follows:

“Look, it’s nothing personal, Richie. Do I find you funny? Not really, but I can’t deny other people seem to enjoy your unique brand of cry-baby humour. And I can’t deny you’re great with the fucked-up students on fall-out spots. But I don’t want there to _ be _ fall-out spots anymore. We’re changing things up around here. I want it to be an open mic bar. That’s open mic _ everything_. Can you sing?”

Richie says, “What are you even talking about? You have to do comedy. It’s called Cask Comedy Club. That’s its name.”

“Only on Facebook, and that can be changed. People just aren’t coming through the doors like they used to, and I need to figure out why that is.”

“Maybe because you charge $18 for a mimosa? I don’t know, call me crazy, I’m just throwing out suggestions here.”

“We have to move with the times. It’s not the ‘90s - hey, I wish it was! But people don’t wanna pay for stand up comedy anymore. They can get the best of the best on Netflix - and that’s with_out _ the pain of having to watch someone bomb.”

“I don’t bomb. When do I bomb?” and then, in a fit of sudden rage that surprises even Richie, he says, “You don’t get it, do you? _ I _ bring your customers in. People come to see me. They don’t come for your fucking Seinfeld-looking decor, or because they like being bankrupted every time they order a wine cooler.”

Infuriatingly, Dan’s response is, “Okay, if you say so.”

And Richie says, “That’s it?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Dan says, remarkably levelly. “I don’t know what you think this is. But there’s a reason this place doesn’t have a Wall of Fame, Richie, and it’s because nobody ever got famous by performing here. What, you want this place to keep booking you until SNL picks you up, is that the idea?”

“No,” Richie says sullenly, like a child. “I just - we’ve always had an agreement. I feel like you’re… abusing the casual worker situation because there’s no contractual obligation. It’s… immoral.”

“It’s immoral that I’m not booking you?”

“I just mean,” Richie starts, and then because he doesn’t know what to say, and he’s already said the wrong thing, he lands on, “I just mean you’re a real fucking asshole sometimes, okay?”

Because why be content to drop down to intermittent bookings? Why not just go the whole nine yards and ensure he’s never booked here again?

**

“And then I told him he was a fucking asshole. Sometimes.”

Bill gives a low whistle, kneeling up on the sofa beside Richie with an arm slung across the back.

“What was his reaction?” he asks eagerly, evidently overjoyed.

“He said he completely understood where I was coming from, and I’d made him come to his senses, and everything would go back to the way it was. And then we made out.”

Bill appears convinced for a moment. Then: “Fuck off.”

“What do you _ think _ his reaction was?” says Richie.

“I don’t know, he’s so mystifying I could honestly believe anything.”

“That’s one word for it.”

“Want another beer?” Bill says sympathetically.

“Oh yeah.”

Richie follows him into the kitchen, because he doesn’t want to be left alone with the others who’ve all congregated round wonderful Ben and Ben’s wonderful pictures of his recent vacation to Italy. Ben says it wasn’t a vacation, it was a work trip, but he seems to have done an awful lot of windsurfing on Lago del Turano all the same. He interns with a big architecture company in the middle of the city, but even an internship pays well. And gets him a tan.

Richie often finds himself wondering what his life might have turned out like if he’d stuck it out at college and got himself a degree and secured an internship like Ben. Then again, unlike Ben who had a clear path in mind, Richie majored in _ Philosophy_, so what the hell he was planning to do with that is anybody’s guess. At best he can answer questions about Nietzsche on _ Who Wants to be a Millionaire_, which seems to have a cruel irony attached to it.

One of Bill’s notorious punches is stewing on the counter top, smelling of Vicks and pineapple. Richie dunks a red cup into it and knocks it back in three disgusting gulps, while Bill grabs him another beer. As he won’t be able to afford to drink in bars again for a long time, it makes sense in Richie’s mind that he get himself drunk when the opportunity presents itself.

It wasn’t even supposed to be a party, just drinks at Bill and Ben’s on a Friday night. But inevitably a couple of Bill’s other friends showed up, and Bev invited over a new girl from work she’s been feeling sorry for, and then Bill felt he ought to crank out the Bose and now everyone’s enjoying Ben’s holiday snaps to the accompaniment of Bill’s carefully curated Marvin Gaye playlist.

Richie’s feeling sullen and a little spoilt, and he doesn’t want to join in but he also doesn’t want anyone to know he doesn’t want to join in, because then when he’s gone they’ll all probably say things behind his back like, “Jeez, what a killjoy” and, “He’s just upset because now he has to get a real job,” and even if Richie wouldn’t be present in this scenario, he still doesn’t think he could handle it.

He sits on the fringe of the group with his beer. Ben, cross-legged on the floor, is now telling stories about being moved to tears by the Colosseum, and he’s got Eddie on one side of him and Bev on the other, and Bev’s looking at Ben like he hung the moon, and Richie watches resentfully, thinking _ he’s too handsome, he’s _ too _ fucking handsome_.

If Richie announced to the room that he cried over an old amphitheatre, Eddie would probably roll his eyes and say, “No, you fucking didn’t, Richie.”

Eddie doesn’t stay hooked on Ben all night, though. After a little while he goes to the kitchen to get another drink, and when he comes back he sits down next to Richie and gently nudges Richie’s knee with his own.

“You’re suspiciously quiet,” he observes, but he smiles a bit when he says it. “Are you okay?”

“Of course, I’m fine.”

Eddie continues to look at him. Richie can see the way his lips twitch, like he’s thinking of what to say next.

“Are you just sad because you’re thinking about the Colosseum?” Eddie says softly, and Richie lets out a snort of surprised laughter.

Eddie smiles, following Richie’s eyes with his own, like he’s trying to gauge his expression.

“I heard about what happened at work,” he says. “Do you -”

“Nothing happened.”

“Right. It’s just that you -”

“What? Nothing happened. You don’t have to look at me like that.”

Eddie frowns. “Okay, asshole,” he says, without much bite. He pauses for a moment; the silence is uncomfortable, and Richie doesn’t make any effort to fill it. “You know, Dan’s such a colossal dick, I can talk to him if -”

“What? No, I don’t need - I’m fine, I’ve been working, I’m _ fine_. I don’t wanna - why are we talking about this?”

He can deal with Bill’s pity, but the thought of Eddie feeling sorry for him makes Richie’s insides shudder.

He sighs, gestures with his head to the fire escape. “I’m gonna…” he starts, without bothering to finish.

The truth is, on top of everything else going on right now (or _ not _ going on, as the problem seems to be) being around Eddie is starting to make Richie feel agitated, like he’s constantly waiting for something terrible to happen, some sudden bomb to go off.

“You’re just feeling a little persecuted right now,” was what Beverly said to him when he explained it to her two nights ago, over _ Demolition Man _ and a bottle of Zin. “You’re fine, honey. Nothing bad’s going to happen. Nothing that can’t be fixed.”

Which is possibly true, but he’s always been like this; has always found it cathartic to let one thing get to him and then let everything else fall down behind it like dominoes, even when it isn’t necessary.

Richie doesn’t even know what it is that’s getting to him. It’s not like he won’t get more work. It’s not like anything’s changed too much, not really. It’s just that it feels like the whole world is stretching out before him, telling him to eat the whole of it up, only he can’t get started, he can’t even begin to know what to do with it all.

He finishes his drink, draws deeply on his vape which is loaded with a caramel café cartridge that makes him feel sick, and when he’s feeling like he can possibly shake himself into a performance again he goes back inside.

He spots Eddie and Bill in a corner, hunched over something, laughing, and has a brief moment of tipsy panic where he assumes they’re laughing at him. Bill-and-Eddie is not a combination Richie’s had much experience with, even though they were friends long before Richie and Bev moved in next door. It makes him feel weirdly apprehensive.

“What’s the joke?” he says when he approaches them, tone coming out a little sharper than intended.

“The joke is that you don’t have a drink in your hand, buddy,” Bill says smoothly, giving him a swift little punch to the arm.

There’s a brief moment where they all do nothing but smile. Richie realises, when it’s a good few seconds too late, that by not saying anything he’s inadvertently forced the idea that he really does want to know what the joke is. When he’s not sure he wants to know at all.

“Eds just got this funny message,” Bill explains, and that’s annoying, Richie thinks, the way he says ‘Eds’.

“Oh yeah?” Richie tries to keep his voice light.

“It’s not really that interesting,” Eddie says evasively, deftly thumbing the lock button on his phone.

“Go on, it _ is_,” Bill insists. “Richie’ll find it funny.”

“Yeah,” says Richie, feeling spiky, “go on. I could do with a laugh.”

And maybe he’s imagining it, but before Eddie taps his fingerprint to the back of his phone and hands it over, Richie thinks he notices a slight furrowing of his dark brows; a little scowl, like a challenge.

Richie only glances at the Tinder message; he sees a lot of emojis. He doesn’t want to read what it says. He taps back on to the guy’s profile, and swipes through his photos quickly.

“Ooh, so he’s been on safari,” he comments.

“Hey - don’t do that.” Eddie grapples for his phone, but Richie takes a step back.

“I’m assuming the tiger he’s posing with has been heavily drugged.”

“Richie.”

“And here he is at a full moon party in Thailand. _ Obviously_.”

“_Richie_.”

“Hold on a second, man, I’m just looking for the pictures of him working in an African orphanage. Just gotta get through the ones of him kayaking. Honestly, each of these pictures is the photographic equivalent of the most boring conversations in the world.”

“Just give me my phone back.”

Richie hands it over like he’s offering a cigarette, and Eddie snatches it from him.

“The message was funny, by the way,” Richie says. “I nearly laughed.”

He doesn’t actually realise he’s being belligerent until after he’s said it, at which point it’s too late. He was sure Eddie would laugh. But Eddie doesn’t.

Bill stands between them, tapping the top of his beer bottle.

“Well,” he says finally, “I thought it was quite funny.”

Eddie looks at Richie, his face unmoving, but when Ben beckons Bill over and Bill escapes with frankly no attempt at hiding his relief, Eddie drags Richie over to the hallway, out of earshot.

“What the fuck, Richie?” And then, when Richie says nothing, Eddie continues, “You’re on apps.”

“Come again?”

“Don’t play dumb.” He glances in at the party. When he turns back to Richie, he lowers his voice. “Are you trying to make me feel bad for something?”

“No,” says Richie, and when it looks like Eddie might soften, he adds, “I am fully in favour of you going on as many kayaking dates as -”

“Oh fuck _ off_, Richie. You’re on fucking _ Grindr_. And I know you go out with Bev all the time, and you want me to think you’re not _ doing _ anything with anyone?”

Richie shrugs, a little uncomfortable. Because he isn’t sure which would be worse; not saying anything and letting Eddie think that he’s right, or telling the truth and spitting out some juvenile admission of, “Well yes, but it was only _ kissing_,” like a tenth grader caught cheating.

“I don’t know what we’re fucking doing,” Eddie sighs, stepping back, arms limp.

“I do,” says Richie. “Nothing. We’re doing nothing.”

Eddie scrubs his hand over his face. He looks tired.

“Then why are we arguing? Look, we either need to figure out what this is or we just stop.”

Richie can think of nothing to say to this, so they stand in silence, until Richie puts his hand out, gesturing to the phone in Eddie’s pocket. Later, in bed, he’ll wonder if there was something else he could have said to save things, to keep Eddie with him, but nothing occurs to him in this moment besides telling Eddie, “You should go out with him. Even if he does pose with drugged tigers. A free drink’s a free drink, right?”

Even as he says it, he knows he shouldn't. Eddie smiles, unhappy, tongue in his cheek, like he’s holding something back. He nods, but not like he's agreeing with Richie. More like he's agreeing with something he's thought of himself.

“You’re such an asshole,” Eddie says, but gently, almost like it’s a joke. Though there’s nothing funny about this at all.

In fact, Richie thinks, as he goes back to his own apartment later that night, it’s just about the least funny situation he’s ever been in. When enough time has passed, he’ll probably write a joke about it.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW, this took forever.

“I’m not saying my parents don’t love me, I’m just saying that every aspect of my life is an intense disappointment to them. I was a drastically overdue baby. I got glasses when I was two years old. Shark teeth at six. Diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia when I was nine. Came out as gay when I was fourteen. Braces and frankly abominable acne between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. I’m periodically anemic, chronically depressed, allergic to insect bites, prone to tonsillitis, and my voice sounds like this. I rang my mom recently to say I’d been to the doctor who’d told me I’d developed a histamine intolerance. She was like, 'Always a tone of expectation with you, Rich'. I was like, 'Expectation of what?' She was like, ‘That I'll actually be fucking surprised'.”

**

It doesn’t take long for Eddie to get a boyfriend.

He doesn’t use the word ‘boyfriend’. He uses the phrase, “I’m kind of seeing someone,” in response to Richie’s opening gambit, which is, “I’m sorry it’s taken so long to admit this, but I wanna wine and dine the fuck outta you.”

Richie feels like he’s been punched when Eddie says it, standing there, casually wiping down a glass. Cask is mostly empty in the afternoon, too late for lunch and too early for happy hour, so if Richie were to make a strangled noise of anguish, no one would be around to hear it.

If a man makes a strangled noise of anguish, and no one is around to hear it, is he still dying?

“Is it the drugged tiger guy?”

“No, Richie. He was an asshole. I’d’ve told you I thought he was an asshole, but you didn’t give me the chance.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Good. I’m glad you are.”

“What’s he like?” Richie asks, instead of what he really wants to ask which is, ‘Is he real, or are you just trying to fuck me up?’

Eddie shrugs, looking for all the world like he wishes a customer would come in. “He’s um… I dunno. Do we have to talk about this? It’s kind of weird.”

“Oh. Do you want me to go?”

“You don’t have to,” Eddie says immediately, then hesitates. “Really. Do you want something? I could make you a drink?”

But the thought of Eddie trying to put up with him out of politeness is more unbearable than him being angry, and Richie finds himself only able to back away from the counter, trying to smile.

“No, it’s okay, I have to go anyway. I’ve... I’m going to see my parents, I have to pack.”

He isn’t going to Maine for another week, but it’s all he can think of to say.

He stops at Screamin’ Beans on his way home, because Bev won’t be off work for another hour and he can’t bear the thought of being alone in the apartment. He orders banana stuffed French toast, and being that it’s three in the afternoon the choice seems to set off alarm bells in Mike.

“Everything okay, man? This is a late breakfast, even for you.”

“Everything’s fine. I just waited two weeks too long to apologise to someone and now they’ve found themselves a boyfriend who I’ve never met but who I’m choosing to imagine as a gym rat who wears Vibram FiveFingers.”

“I’m sorry, that sounds rough. Would it help if I didn’t charge you for the extra peanut butter?”

“Maybe a little bit.”

He’s miserable for three days. Then Beverly comes into his bedroom and throws his jacket at him.

“Get up,” she says. “We’re going bowling.”

Richie peels the jacket from his face. “It’s Tuesday night.”

“So?”

“So that’s absurd.”

“No, what’s absurd is that Hollywood Bowl is doing two games and four drinks for twenty bucks and you’re considering not taking advantage of that. It’s Tenpin Tuesday, Richie. _ Tenpin Tuesday_.”

“I have to see Ben in all manner of sportswear, day in, day out. I have no desire to extend that to a bowling shirt that says ‘King Pin’ on the back. Thank you, and goodnight.”

“First of all, you’re an asshole, and second of all, Ben is at hot yoga tonight so it’ll just be me and you.” She flicks him two finger guns. “Just two bros splitting pins on Tenpin Tuesday.”

Richie looks at her from his bed. She looks right back at him. She’s already high-heeled, lipsticked and leather jacketed.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Richie says after a moment. “You’re just gonna use the phrase ‘hot yoga’ in front of me and pretend that doesn’t deserve further explanation?”

Beverly doesn’t answer. She walks into the room and over to the end of his bed. She grabs his ankles in both hands, and just as he’s telling her, “_Please _ do not touch my feet,” she begins dragging him off the bed like a woman possessed.

“Get out. Of bed. And brush. Your. Hair,” she says through gritted teeth. “I want. Cheap. _ Coors_.”

He lands on his bedroom floor with a thud. Forty minutes later, they’re collecting their beers from the sticky counter at Hollywood Bowl.

Of course, it would have been easier to avoid what is clearly intended as an intervention if Bev hadn’t been savvy enough to pick bowling. Richie _ loves _ bowling. He was never very athletic at school, and instead lived up to his own stereotype of gangly goofball by developing an affinity for any sport which could be played while drinking somewhere dingy: bowling, pool, darts, and Pinball.

Beverly is dreadful, and without a hint of shame selects the retractable bumpers whenever it’s her go. She knocks down four of the ten pins on her first go and does a little fist pump into the air.

“Off to a great start,” she says, completely unironically.

Bev isn’t happy all the time. But she’s optimistic in a way that Richie can’t fathom, although he admires it. When they finish their first game (Richie’s 149 to Bev’s 50) she clinks their bottles together and says cheerfully, “That was a close one.”

“Pretty freakin’ close,” Richie agrees.

“You want some nachos to celebrate your win?”

“You know, I think I’m good.” He raises his bottle to drink from it, stops when he notices her staring. “What?”

“You’re not hungry?”

“Not really.”

“You’re _ always _ hungry.”

He glances around, at the grimy tabletops and patterned carpet which is grey but might have been blue and pink once.

“Not enough to want to risk contracting norovirus, I guess,” he shrugs.

“Norovirus?” Beverly explodes. “Norovirus. Okay. I’m assuming this is Eddie’s influence.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, he’s the guy who’d rather let his bladder burst than use a Wendy’s bathroom, and you’re the guy I once watched smother cold McNuggets in salsa and then proceed to microwave them on full blast.” She taps one chewed purple fingernail against her chin, and finally asks what she’s clearly been itching to ask since Bill’s get together a couple of weeks ago. “Are you and him still, you know. Seeing each other…?”

“Uh, well,” says Richie awkwardly. “Not exactly.”

“Are you even talking?”

“Sure. Here and there.”

“So you’re…?”

“We’re… pals.”

_ Pals_? Richie’s fairly certain he’s never used that word before in his life.

He senses Beverly wants details, but that would only result in a very short, banal little story of eleven WhatsApp messages and a handful of Twitter replies. Ever nurturing, she goes to the counter and orders nachos for them both anyway, with extra sour cream, like an antidote to something. Richie finds he appreciates them more than he thought he would, norovirus be damned.

Maybe contracting norovirus would be a good thing. No one is more roused to emotion by illness than Eddie.

They start their second game, but Richie has lost the will to live all of a sudden and bowls badly. There’s a group of six or seven teenagers using the lane next to them, and they keep whistling or groaning every time he fucks up, which is a lot. This goes on for some time, and Richie can feel himself getting more and more annoyed, until eventually all he wants to do is round on them and yell, “Look, will you all just _ fuck off_? I’m _ very _ insecure right now!”

Like his own mother used to, Beverly seems to find their scornful audience character-building or emboldening or something, because she insists they finish the game they’ve paid for.

“That was fun,” she says at the end, in a tone which suggests she isn’t even convinced of this herself. They move to the bar area, away from the derisive teenagers. She tries to pick up her beer bottle, and has to tug it when it sticks to the table. Then she looks at him and draws her face into a smile. “So. All packed for Maine?”

“I mean, I threw some Xanax and Death Wish cold brew into a rucksack, if that’s what you mean.”

“Ha ha.”

“You’re _ sure _ you don’t wanna come be my plus one?”

“Absolutely not. Your mother is terrifying, your sister is terrifying, and Maine is - not terrifying, exactly, but certainly ominous. I also don’t want your dad to get confused about your sexuality again. I’m thoughtful in that way.”

“Even you hooking up with next door’s gardener at that Fourth of July barbecue was not enough to convince him that you weren’t my girlfriend. I don’t know if that says more about him or me,” says Richie. “I should’ve asked Eddie to come when I had the chance. I think my dad would’ve liked him. They’re both very clean.”

“You should have,” Beverly agrees, which doesn’t help. “Has that ship sailed then?”

“It’s sailed halfway across the Atlantic and hit an iceberg.” Richie shrugs, beginning to tear a cardboard coaster into strips. “It’s not all bad. I hooked up with my high school bully a couple Thanksgivings ago. Maybe I’ll see if he’s still knocking around.”

“Very tragic, Rich. Very nice.”

“God, I know, right?”

“I think you should stay away from men for a while. I think it’d do you good to have some time on your own.” She says this in a tone which suggests there’s no room for argument. “I’m going to lend you some books to take with you to your parents’ place. You need to run a lot of baths and drink a lot of wine and read a lot of books, okay? It’ll mend your soul.”

Richie hasn’t read a book since _ Lord of the Flies _ in tenth grade. But when they get home Beverly hands him a stack of the things, and he’s intrigued by one called _ How to Stop Worrying and Start Living_, not so much because of the title but because of the preface which says, “I was one of the unhappiest lads in New York.”

If this guy was one of them, Richie is the other. If only to keep Bev happy, he promises to read it.

**

“Do we have to listen to European music?” Richie’s father asks, holding on to the car’s grab handle pointedly in order to stress that he’s not only unhappy with the choice in music, he’s also hotly uncomfortable with his son’s driving.

“It’s Jennifer Lopez,” says Richie.

“I don’t know what that is.”

They stop at a traffic light, and Richie picks up his cracked phone to switch from JLo to Run DMC.

“Okay, here’s an American classic for you, Dad.”

“‘It’s like that - and that’s the way it is’?” his dad echoes flatly, after a minute or so. “Groundbreaking.”

Sometimes people look at Richie and his dad and wonder how it could be that one produced the other. The only thing they share is their height; they’ve borrowed Richie’s mother’s violet Chevy Spark, and both of them have to hunch slightly to fit into it. The whole scenario seems slightly unjust, given that _ she _ was the one who forgot to buy avocado ice cream and La Croix for the party, and _ they _ are the ones on their way to Whole Foods to get it, but the Tozier household has always been governed by a robust female energy. Richie’s grandfather once suggested that Richie turning out gay was merely an instance of attempted assimilation.

“How are you doing for money?” his dad asks, after a few minutes of silence.

Richie is astute enough to sense that his dad does not want to be in the car with him on the way to Whole Foods - he once described Richie as an ‘undeservedly confident’ driver - but neither did he want to be at home where Richie’s mother could shout at him for using the toilet before guests arrived, and it’s because of this cowardice that both he and Richie now have to endure small talk.

“Pretty good. When we first moved into our apartment the old owners left behind a bunch of crockery, so I’ve just slowly been selling it off on eBay.”

“That’s resourceful of you.”

“The ones I paint Bible verses on to sell the best. Revelations, particularly.”

“Oh, I see. You were joking.”

“The lakes that burn with fire, the sea that fills with blood, all that good stuff.”

“And are you still trying to quit smoking?” his dad asks, keen to move away from his son’s jokes which, at one point, perhaps twenty years ago, he’d been charmed by, but which now he appears to be permanently exasperated with.

“I quit ages ago,” says Richie, which isn’t exactly a lie. At one point, he’d have stuffed his pockets with six packs of Marlboro Reds at the train station before visiting his parents. This time he’s just loaded up on blueberry pancake vape cartridges and self-help books, which has to be an improvement.

“Good job, son,” his dad says brightly. “Tell your mom when we get home. She’ll be happy.”

They smile at each other, a little awkwardly, and then in unison eye the Whole Foods sign up ahead with palpable relief.

**

Bev’s self-help books are largely condescending and very vintage, but they’re a good distraction. It’s not that Richie doesn’t like being at home; it’s just that his parents possess the unfortunate combination of a rather small house and a rather extensive and starry social life. Richie tried to creep across the landing from his bedroom to the bathroom the other night without his mother and her weekly Book and Gin Club hearing him, but no sooner had his fingers touched the doorknob than his mother was yelling up the stairs, “Richie?! Are you alright?!” making him nearly jump out of his skin.

His sister’s engagement party plays host to no fewer than sixty of their closest family and friends, all of them crammed into the garden amongst his mother’s beloved spring-blooming lilacs and camellias. Richie makes an effort, thinking there might be a cute rebound boy amongst his sister’s law school friends with a penchant for unemployment and short-sightedness. He goes into town to get his hair cut in the morning, and selects a bright red and cream Cuban collar shirt, a vintage steal from Goodwill that he considers hugely appropriate party attire until his sister sidles up to him, champagne flute in hand, and says, “Why are you dressed like that? You look like an extra in _ Narcos_.”

He thinks of the books he’s been trudging his way through on his cramped, childhood bed all week, and tries to land on a healthy response to this somewhat hurtful observation. The only quote he can think of is “you and everyone you know are going to be dead soon”.

So he says, “Holly, you and everyone I know is going to be dead soon. So I’m going to wear the shirt.”

And she says, “Don’t be so fucking morbid, I’m getting married.”

Politically, of course, Richie doesn’t agree with marriage. He rallies against the smug self-satisfaction of it all, the apolitical Disneyland engagements, the idea that choosing _ not _ to marry is some fundamental failure of belonging.

But he wonders, not for the first time, if sixty people would show up for _ his _ engagement, should he ever find himself in one. If his mother would spend all morning painstakingly wrapping cantaloupe in prosciutto. If the neighbours would appear with a Home Depot gift card and a crate of Blue Moon. He’s dimly aware that it would, at the very least, make him more palatable to his family and their friends.

“Are you next then, Richie?” his mother’s cousin asks him, after his sister’s intended has given a tepid speech to frankly undeserved applause.

“For what?” he says.

“Getting married,” she smiles, all dopey, like just saying the word triggers a release of serotonin.

“Oh,” he says. “No, thank you.”

“Oh, but you _ can _ now -” her large husband butts in, before stopping himself awkwardly. “I mean. It’s legal.”

Richie shrugs. “So’s cannibalism.” Then, when no one says anything, he adds, “That’s actually true.”

He knows it’s rude to intentionally make house guests uncomfortable, but he’s trying out something else he read in one of Beverly’s books: being responsible for what he says and does, but not being responsible for how everyone else _ reacts _ to what he says and does. Which is hard, when all you want to do is perform for everyone, but it’s how Eddie seems to live _ his _ life, and it’s what Richie can’t help loving about him.

Eddie. He’d turn his nose up at all this. Richie wishes he was here, so they could take on the swathes of delicate heterosexuals together. They’d hoard a bunch of beers and canapes - which would be perfect for Eddie as he almost exclusively eats in tiny mouthfuls - and sneak off to the basement to tangle up and watch TCM.

Richie snaps himself out of the fantasy. Another of Bev’s books tells him he should focus on what his life is like, not what he thinks it should be like. He’s realising, in a way that makes his head spin a little, that a lot of this advice is just lists of things he shouldn’t be doing.

What he should be doing, he decides, is getting drunk. Weirdly, none of the books tell him this is a bad idea. But he’s barely tipsy when his mother plucks his beer out of his hand and replaces it with a Snapple bottle, telling him, “Don’t be sloppy,” like he’s thirteen years old at Stan’s bar mitzvah.

He wanders off, irritable and bored. His mother follows him to the bottom of the garden, except he doesn’t realise this until he sits at the foot of the big tree with its decades-old tyre swing, and she sits down next to him, right on the grass.

“What are you doing?” he asks, surprised. She is not a grass-sitting type of woman.

“I’m coming to make sure you aren’t angry with me.”

“Why would I be angry with you?”

She points to his iced tea with a manicured finger. “For spoiling your fun.”

He looks determinedly at his feet, unsure of what she expects him to say.

“Um,” he manages, finally. “Mom, you don’t have to come and sit with me, you know. I know it’s not my day. You don’t have to, like, console me.” He means it to be considerate, but it doesn’t really sound how he intends.

“What on earth would I be consoling you about?”

“I don’t know. The fact that your daughter’s getting married and your son isn’t?”

“Do you want to get married?”

“No.”

“Well, then. What’s the problem? You don’t want to get married, big deal.” She flaps her hands, like she’s tired. “Less stress for me. Less spending.”

“So you aren’t concerned that people might think I’m a weirdo? That the guy from dad’s golf club just referred to me as the ‘beatnik brother’?”

She rolls her eyes, which is probably what he deserves.

“I’m concerned that you care too much about what other people think,” she shrugs. “That’s what I’m concerned about.”

“This coming from you?”

“What does that mean?”

“You have to admit you’re a little embarrassed by me.”

“No, I don’t! I’m not embarrassed by you!” She grabs his face in her hands. “Look at your wonderful face! Look at your lovely straight nose!”

She’s always been weird about his nose.

“So, just to clarify,” says Richie, voice slightly muffled where she’s still holding his face, “you don’t care that I’m single, or that I haven’t been headhunted for a job on LinkedIn, or that I dropped out of college?” He’s feeling a little surly, but with tipsiness has come the desire for validation, and a few compliments.

“Christ, Richie,” his mother says, in a tone which suggests there won’t be any compliments. “I care that you eat. I care that you’re warm. I care that you take your goddamned MultiVit, though I know you don’t. I want you to have money. I want you to pay your rent on time. These are the only things I want for you. Anything else is a bonus. I don’t really care how you live your life, as long as you’re safe and happy.” She looks at him, not like she’s disappointed in his life, just disappointed that he doesn’t already know all of this. “Where did it come from? This insistence that everyone is out to get you?”

“Not _ get _ me, as such,” Richie mumbles, fiddling with the cap on his bottle. “Just get _ at _ me.”

“Richie,” she says, shaking her head. “Baby. Please stop giving such a _ damn_.”

It’s what all of these books have been telling him, but it only seems to make real sense when it’s his mother saying it to him, exasperated, letting her cream skirt crease and stain on the grass.

When their guests are suitably intoxicated from strawberry wine punch and the unseasonably hot weather, Richie manages to escape to his bedroom. He’s an extrovert, constantly leaching his energy from other people, but even he can only withstand so much ABBA and playing spectator to so many games of Mr & Mrs. It’s hard, when everyone else is in a couple, bickering over who takes up the most space in bed and which celebrity they’d allow their partner to sleep with, and he is the extra from _ Narcos _ who is painfully, obviously single.

He swipes a bottle of fruity Rosé from the kitchen on his way past, and retreats to his bed at seven o’clock in the evening.

He used to love his room when he was a kid. It’s right at the top of the house, with a dormer window providing far-reaching views across the neighbour’s houses behind theirs. When he was about nine, he was convinced that the house directly to the back of theirs was the home of a vampire, and many an evening was spent with a pair of binoculars, gathering evidence in support of this theory. The evidence largely consisted of the fact that the neighbour was handsome and tall and swaggered about a lot, and Richie and Stan had snuck into the basement one night to watch _ Fright Night _ on the big TV, and the vampire in that was handsome and tall and swaggered about a lot.

In hindsight, the spying game was very likely some sort of budding sexual awakening, as it continued for quite some time after Richie dropped the idea that the neighbour was a bloodthirsty murderer. He looks out of the window now to try to gauge if he still lives there, peering across to that garden. There’s a woman taking laundry off the line, and two kids jumping on a trampoline. Typical.

He toes off his shoes, swaps the Cuban collar for a t-shirt and climbs into bed. He forgot a wine glass and has to pour his Rosé into a plastic Mickey Mouse sports bottle he was drinking apple juice out of last night.

He opens the Grindr app on his phone and lies on his back, scrolling and sipping.

**C-Jake84:**

_ Hey how are you? Up to much? _

**Richie** **:**

_ Hey :) no. just battling thru a family event _

**C-Jake84** **:**

_ Ok _

**C-Jake84** **:**

_ i’m battling an erection _

He’s always surprised by how many men in as small and insignificant a place as Derry are on Grindr. He often wonders where they all were when he was stuck growing up here.

**Mans-man**:

_ Evening. Our age gap may be significant but so is my cock. Interested? _

He considers Bev's advice, sipping his wine through the bottle’s built-in straw. Stay away from men. For a while. It will probably do him some good. They’re mostly all nauseating anyway.

He tucks his phone under his pillow and picks _ The Alchemist _ up off the nightstand. It’s his favourite bit of therapy so far; the blurb says it’s about the essential wisdom of listening to your heart, but mostly Richie likes that it’s short, and easy to read, and the textured cover feels nice in his hands in a way that Bev’s ratty copy of _ How to Win Friends and Influence People _ didn’t.

His phone vibrates beneath his pillow while he’s reading. He ignores it, considering that it’s probably a bird's-eye view of Mans-man’s dick.

It buzzes again a couple of minutes later and Richie sighs, grabbing his phone to block him.

A couple of texts from Eddie appear on the screen.

** _Guess who I just saw in Rozana’s_ **

Then:

** _Ok then, don’t guess. It was Charles Bronson (the actor, not the psychopath)_ **

Richie laughs. Then he spends about seven minutes deciding whether or not to respond.

Finally, he does.

** _never heard of him. What was he in? Besides rozanas. I can’t believe you went to rozanas on your own_ **

Eddie doesn’t reply for ages. Richie’s just about to give up and go back to reading about Andalusian shepherds when his phone vibrates again.

** _Death Wish, Death Wish II, Death Wish 3 (not sure why they gave up on the Roman numerals at this point), Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, Death Wish V: The Face of Death (here we see the return to Roman numerals, guess they thought it was classier)_ **

** _And yes I went to Rozana’s on my own, why is that weird?_ **

Richie chucks the book back on the nightstand and rolls on to his stomach. He sips determinedly from the Mickey Mouse straw as he sends back:

** _not weird. Just proud that ur navigating the big bad world of independent takeouts all by yourself these days :)_ **

Eddie sends three rolling eyes emojis. That does it. Richie is so weak. He sits up and dials Eddie’s number.

“Your propensity for phone calls and FaceTime weirds me out,” Eddie says when he answers. “What’s up?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to speak to you about, um...”

“What?” Eddie sounds slightly nervous.

“It’s nothing bad.”

“Oh.”

“Okay,” says Richie. “I didn’t wanna tell you anything. I just felt like calling you. Are you busy?”

“No. I’m at home in my pyjamas watching _ Nailed It_. They’ve just made Christmas cookies in the shape of famous serial killers.”

Richie wants to ask if he’s home alone, but then realises he’d rather not know.

“Bill said you’re home for a family party,” Eddie carries on politely, when Richie stays silent, like a creep. “I hope you’re not suffering too much.”

Richie’s instant reaction is to say that he is, he’s suffering terribly, he fears he’ll never recover - but then realises this isn’t true. Since he’s been home he’s felt calm, he’s been able to sleep, and the heavy, lingering gloom that’s been accompanying him since Bill’s party (and a little bit before) has finally started to lift.

“I’m okay,” he says, surprised to be telling the truth. “It’s good to be home for a little while.”

“You’re coming back, right?” says Eddie, which surprises Richie even more.

“Yeah, sorry. Can’t get rid of me that easily.” He pauses; then, before he can stop himself, he says, “So, I miss you.” Then he winces, pained by his own lack of restraint.

“Richie…”

“I don’t mean like that.”

“Like what? 

“Like… I just mean I miss talking to you and hanging out with you and… I miss being your friend. Sorry, I think I’m drunk. I’m not sure. This wine tastes like AriZona Fruit Punch.”

“We _ are _ friends. Aren’t we?”

“Are we?”

“This is ridiculous, we’re not twelve. Yes, Richie, we’re friends.”

“Okay. Good. Great.” But it still feels like there’s something more. “All the same, I just want you to know that I’m sorry for. You know. Everything. I should have just been honest with you and not weird for once and then maybe we wouldn’t have ended up in this uncomfortable situation where we’re friends who’ve, like. Seen each other’s dicks a bunch of times.”

“I mean, it was slightly more than that, Rich, but I get where you’re coming from.” Eddie pauses. “You don’t have to keep apologising. It’s fine. We both should have been more, um… discerning. Let’s just forget about it.”

Richie doesn’t want to forget it. Not all of it, anyway. He tries to say this; the words get stuck in his throat.

“Let’s hang out when I’m back,” he says instead, not wanting to consider the idea that he might be blown off for the new guy Eddie’s seeing.

But Eddie doesn’t bring this up either.

“Okay,” he says. “Text me when you’re back. And, um. Richie?”

“Yeah?”

Silence, for a moment.

“Uh,” Eddie says again, “nothing. Doesn’t matter.”

When they’ve ended the call and Richie’s returned to his fizzy wine, his phone vibrates with another message from Eddie.

** _I was going to say I miss you too but I felt really lame, so. There you go._ **

And Richie, for all his feelings, and confessions, and regrets, can think of a reply no more profound than:

** _u are lame_ **

** _p.s. i just checked, charles bronson is also dead_ **

Still, it’s a start. He’s trying. Hell, he’s self-therapising, that has to get him somewhere. _ The Alchemist _ is decent, but of the stack of books Bev gave him, _ How to Stop Worrying and Start Living _ was the one Richie read first. He plucked from it a line of advice he’s been trying to use as a mantra ever since: ‘When the fierce, burning winds blow over our lives, accept the inevitable. And then get busy and pick up the pieces’.

So that’s what he’s going to do.

  1. Get busy
  2. Pick up the pieces
  3. Stop giving such a damn


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. first of all, I'm sorry this took SO LONG to post. do I even need to say it? Rona.
> 
> 2\. thank you for all the lovely feedback?? especially people who were still leaving feedback when I was on complete radio silence? it was very very nice of you all!
> 
> 3\. [I have a tumblr where I will (hopefully) be posting future stories.](https://bluepeon-y.tumblr.com/) I mean I am locked tf down at home so what excuse do I have really

“This is not the life I envisioned for myself. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. I fucking _ loved _ space, man. You find that kids fall into one of several categories; they’re either a space kid, a dinosaur kid, or an Ancient Egypt kid. Or they’re attractive. These things tend to be mutually exclusive, I don’t make the rules.

When I got to high school I started actively researching the space program. I found out that unfortunately I was not considered fit for space. You have to have 20/20 vision, have excellent physical capabilities with no underlying health conditions, and be free from psychiatric disorders. This little depressed four-eyed bitch was not going to space.

What’s sad is that in so many ways, I would be a _ perfect _ fit for space travel. Astronauts have to be able to withstand extensive periods of solitude with no sexual activity, no fresh food, no exercise, no showers - bitch, I’m already qualified! And yes, microgravity makes it extremely difficult to get a boner in space but it also makes it nearly impossible to cry, so in a way it would kind of fix me.”

**

Richie is dying. Not figuratively. Literally. Heart palpitations, sweating, gasping for air. More or less keeled over. He hasn’t felt this bad since that dodgy upper at Bill’s Christmas Eve Eve Eve party last year.

He fumbles in his pocket for his vape pen and presses the release with his sweaty thumb.

“Richie,” says Ben, above him. “Seriously?”

“What? I can’t breathe!”

“It’s not an inhaler.”

“Well,” says Richie, after a long drag, “now I can breathe, so on some level you’re wrong.”

It doesn’t help that it’s disgustingly hot out. He goes to stand up, and spots an attractive jogger on the other side of the wide path. He immediately crouches back down, pretending to tie his shoelace, but it’s too late; another glance up, and there it is, the jogger’s sympathetic smile, the one that says _ you’re new to this, aren’t you? Little bitch. _

“God, this sucks,” Richie sighs, standing up properly.

“What? Why?” says Ben. He’s stretching out his chunky leg against a railing. He already did this before they set off, but now for some unfathomable reason he’s doing it again.

“I look like a dick, Ben.”

“_ No _,” says Ben, scandalised. “You’re doing well!”

Richie stares at him. “Really? You’re gonna lie to me? When I look like this?”

Exercise was Bill’s idea. Working out with Ben was Bev’s idea. Jogging was Ben’s idea.

Ben. Richie always had the sense he was hiding some secret behind that calm, amiable exterior, and now here it is: a passion for inner-city jogging. In _ activewear_.

Richi had resisted the activewear, but he’s paying for it now. Beneath his Fraggle Rock t-shirt, he’s drenched.

“Come on.” Ben stands up straight again, shaking off his strong legs like a brown bear. “Only a mile and a half to go.”

“I just think, in this day and age, there’s no logical reason for any human to be running a mile and a half.”

“It’s not running, it’s jogging.”

“You go on ahead. I’ll catch you up. Potentially in an Uber, I don’t know.”

There had been a moment, when they’d first set off, of euphoric realisation dawning. It registered to Richie that he could actually do this. He was going. He was moving. He was _ exercising_. Finally! Exercising! Outside! Like a real city-dweller! He even had the handsome, urbane running partner to accompany him. Jogging was the kind of thing he’d assumed he’d pick up naturally when he moved to the city, just like purchasing coffee from a bodega every day, and using a MacBook in public, and hailing a taxi by whistling.

Of course, none of these things came to pass and, in similar fashion, Richie’s newfound zeal for jogging was short lived. By the third block it was beginning to hurt. By the fourth he was ready to die.

They go back to the apartment, at Richie’s insistence, and Bev is furious.

“Two miles, Richie? You couldn’t manage _ two miles_?”

“It’s hot out,” Richie whines, flopping on the couch. “And I’m not well.”

“It _ is _ hot today,” Ben says kindly.

“Ben - no,” says Bev, pointing a finger. She turns the finger on Richie. “What do you mean you’re not well?”

“Not well, borderline alcoholic, what’s the difference? Wanna watch Ghost Adventures?”

She takes the TV remote off him and plonks herself down in the armchair opposite, turning the TV on herself. “You need a hobby,” she tells him, as though he asked.

“I have plenty of hobbies.”

“Sorry, touching your nether regions and listening to ‘Ironic’ by Alanis Morrisette on repeat don’t count.”

“Well, shoot.”

Richie wishes he’d never told her about his three step self-betterment plan. She responded a little too enthusiastically to the ‘get busy’ step. First it was baking. Then yoga. Now jogging. Richie doesn’t understand why ‘busy’ can’t mean something cool, like go-karting or getting tattoos. So far he’s made a dry batch of brownies, pulled a muscle in the Lotus Pose, and nearly had a heart attack beside a hot dog stand in the park. Bev’s ideas for hobbies _ suck_.

And yet, the following Saturday, when Ben texts to ask if he wants to come out with him again, Richie is vaguely into the idea. Rationally, he has no reason to be. He’s still unfit. He still has no decent running shoes. But he quite liked the way his legs tingled as he lay in bed after his admittedly brief workout, and in hindsight he quite liked hanging out with… well, with _ Ben _.

“I was a fat kid,” Ben huffs, as they jog along that morning. It’s still hell, but it’s cloudier today so it’s not quite as hell as it was last time. “I started running to lose weight. But you know, it gives me so much time to reflect and gather my thoughts that now I just do it for fun.”

“Same story with me and cocaine,” Richie says breathlessly.

Ben laughs. “Hey, it’s the best pre-workout going,” he says, which in turns makes Richie laugh, mostly in surprise.

“I don’t know why Bev is so obsessed with me doing this with you. You probably feel like a complete idiot having to be seen with me.”

“Why would I? I’m totally into it, you’re making me look good.” Ben bats him in the arm with one of his big paws, and Richie laughs again. He can’t quite believe it’s taken him this long to realise Ben has a sense of humour - but then, Richie’s heard more than once that he suffers from an acute case of self-absorption.

Richie actually makes it to Ben’s imaginary finishing line today. Not complaining seems to help, though Richie still has to wipe his drenched face with the bottom of his t-shirt when they get there. They stop in a little shop for smoothies. When they sit down, the first thing Ben does is take out his phone and send a text. He holds it up when he’s done with a slightly embarrassed grin.

“Just telling Bev we’re safe,” he says. Two weeks ago Richie might’ve rolled his eyes.

“She’s certainly a worrier,” he agrees, dunking his straw into the orange gloop of his smoothie.

“Tell me about it. She couldn’t sleep last night because someone’s cat was meowing on their balcony across the street. She was _ this _ close to kidnapping it.”

“God, that cat, I was gonna fucking drug it.”

Ben laughs. “She said you’d say that.” He pauses, rolling his head and shoulders indecisively. “She, uh. Worries about you a _ lot_.”

Richie, concerned this is an intervention, whips the straw from his smoothie and starts chugging it. He knew he should have been more suspicious about ulterior motives when Ben invited him out for a second time. Now he’s cornered in Smoothie Queen.

“I think part and parcel of dating that girl is accepting that you’re just about the most important guy in her life,” Ben continues with a little smile.

The admission makes Richie’s chest swell with pride and shrivel with embarrassment all at once.

“It’s nothing to do with me,” he says, without really thinking. “She takes care of all of her friends. She’s a good person.” He means that too, he realises. “And, um. Ben? While we’re pouring our hearts out over, uh… these smoothies... I’m sorry if I ever gave the impression you weren’t, you know, welcome or whatever. It’s just that Bev’s dated a lot of assholes and I didn’t realise until recently that you weren’t one of them. And that’s not just because you’re willingly appearing in public with me as a running partner. I actually realised you weren’t an asshole when you came round at 2 a.m. that time and got rid of that huge fucking centipede in the bathroom. That was - you didn’t have to do that.”

Apologising to all the people he’s been unpleasant to isn’t part of the official three-step plan, but somehow it seems important right now.

“Thanks, Richie,” Ben says, cool and calm as ever. “That means a lot. You know, Bev laughed when I told her this, but I’ve always been a little… well. Intimidated by you, if you want the truth.”

He laughs a little, like it’s not a big deal. Richie blinks, unsure if he’s heard correctly.

“Intimidated? By me?”

“Oh, have I offended you?”

“What? No. It’s just -”

“Maybe ‘intimidated’ is the wrong word. It’s just, you know how it is,” says Ben, but Richie doesn’t. “Everyone knows you. You fit in. People are always talking about you and your stories. If you’re late everyone’s asking where you are. I moved here over two years ago and I still feel like I only know about five people. I don’t know how you do it.” He swirls his straw around, messing with his drink. “I’ve never been very good at drawing people to me.”

“But you’re like… super hot,” Richie blurts out.

Ben hums, clearly embarrassed. “I don’t know…”

“Okay,” Richie scoffs. “Sure.”

“It’s not about that anyway, is it? It’s about… I don’t know.” He shrugs. “You either have it or you don’t, is that the saying?”

Richie’s been told a lot of things about himself before, but the notion that he has _ it _ is, frankly, quite startling.

When he gets home, the first thing he does is find Beverly and give her a big hug. She’s on a little stool in the kitchen with a trash bag, reaching into the backs of the cupboards to clear out old jars of spices and sauce they’ve never used. She’s so tiny she doesn’t need to get off the stool to hug him back.

“What’s this for?” she asks, her voice muffled by his shoulder. Her little hands pat his back.

“Just love you,” he explains.

“Weirdo,” she says, but she sounds pleased. “Is this part of the new you?”

“No.” He steps away, picking up a dusty unopened jar of asafetida Bev bought two years ago when she decided she had a gluten intolerance. “I’m never hugging you again. That was a one time thing.”

“Got it,” Bev nods, pushing her sleeves up and returning to her task. “I hear you made it all the way to Smoothie Queen without going into cardiac arrest today.”

“Yeah, just call me Steve Prefontaine, baby.”

“I will not be doing that. Well done, though. Proud of you.”

Richie leans against the countertop, uncapping a tiny jar of nutmeg, sticking his pinky in and licking experimentally. “Did you know Ben was intimidated by me? Eugh, this is gross.”

Beverly looks from him to the nutmeg and says flatly, “I know. Can you imagine?”

“You knew?”

“He may have mentioned it once or twice.”

“Is that why you wanted me to go running with him? Some kind of male bonding exercise? A chance for him to catch me with my guard down? And by ‘guard down’ I mean sweaty and hideous.”

“Partly. But it’s also excellent free therapy. You know, it makes me sick to say it but ever since I started going to that Jazzercise class on Thursdays, I feel like I can beat-pump my way through anything.”

“Who’d have thought it, Bevs? Us. Exercising. Is that why you’re clearing out the cupboards? So you can replace everything with whey protein and steroids?”

She shrugs, blowing her fringe out of her eyes. “Nah. Just bored.”

“Wanna watch Paranormal Witness instead?”

“Only if you make the Jiffy Pop.”

“Deal.”

She reaches her arms out. He lifts her off the stool. He pretends to buckle under her weight. She smacks him round the head.

**

Richie’s thankful for the unprecedented boost of endorphins, but of course, having the body of an adonis is no good if there’s no boyfriend to dig it.

He’s hardly forgotten the plans he made with Eddie to hang out, but then, Richie has an extremely inconvenient habit of promising to do something and then never actually doing it.

It’s not because he doesn’t want to. In some ways, it would be easier if he _ didn’t _ want to. Then he could just forget about it. The problem is, he wants to see Eddie so badly it hurts. It’s just that every time he gets close to calling or sending a text, his mind drags up some dreadful fantasy, like Eddie shooting him down or, worse, accepting even when he doesn’t want to, and then they’ll have to sit there in awful, awkward silence, after which Richie will simply have to cease to exist. There will be no other option.

Which is stupid because Eddie _ agreed _ to hang out, but what if he was only saying it to be nice? Beverly pokes holes in this theory: Eddie has probably never made an empty gesture in his life - he’d be too afraid of being made to do something he doesn’t want to.

But when Richie actually gets as far as unlocking his phone with the sole intention of contacting him, he spots it. A Tweet, only twenty-five of the two hundred and eighty characters utilised.

**@KaspbrakEddie** \- _ the fridge broke, sooo… _

This, followed by a picture of some rooftop restaurant; white tablecloths, the sky a luxurious blue.

Four words and a picture - enough, in Richie’s mind, of a sign of Eddie’s commitment to this new mystery person surely. Who goes to nice restaurants alone? Richie zooms in on the picture to look for clues, evidence of who he might be with, but it’s just a sea of mimosas and RayBans. Fortunately, and as always, Richie has his trusty brain to fill in the gaps. He imagines that Eddie’s boyfriend is tall, handsome, and completely neurologically sound.

He realises this is not how someone ought to behave. In a bid to think healthily, he distracts himself by writing new material and plying his trade at any club who’ll pay him. Beverly, as usual, disagrees with this approach.

“We need to think bigger,” she says one evening, leaning over from where she’s painting her toenails to watch Richie trawl through Facebook for potential gigs.

“‘We’?”

“Do you remember Ben’s friend Greg’s girlfriend’s friend Taylor? He had one of those non-surgical hair transplants?”

“No.”

“He’s into property, total boner for gentrification, complete asshole. Anyway, _ he’s _ got a share in The Pink Onion, it’s that place where -”

“The place where they don’t pay anyone, I know of it.”

“Right. Only they’re totally discerning, they only take the best, and they pull _ huge _ crowds -”

Richie rolls onto his back to look at her. “I don’t wanna perform without getting paid, man. It looks desperate.”

“You _ are _ desperate.”

“Yes, but I don’t want people to know that.” He turns back to his laptop. “Besides, I don’t have any recorded material to show them.”

“So what? I’m sure Ben could pull a few strings.”

“Yeah, I’m sure Ben’s friend’s wife’s friend’s second cousin Taylor, who doesn’t even manage the place, will welcome me with open arms.”

“Don’t be a sour bitch.” She kicks him, then curses when she smudges her nail polish.

Richie doesn’t pursue The Pink Onion. It’s trendy, and mean, and a little weird, and only serves craft beer. The place claims to make people famous, but he hasn’t heard of it churning out any professional comedians besides some dude who ended up writing for SNL, and then getting fired for plagiarism.

But maybe Bev has a point. Richie has gotten comfortable being paid, but he’s so far out of his comfort zone in every other aspect of his life why not rock the boat financially too? What’s the worst that could happen? Eviction, probably.

He sits on it a few days, then hesitantly requests a spot at The Magic Club on Facebook.

“That’s great!” says Bev, when he shows her. “I love that place! I once saw Aubrey Plaza there. She wasn’t performing, she was just eating bruschetta.”

“There’s a catch,” says Richie. “It’s a competition.”

“_ Fun _, Rich.”

“Yeah. Fun! Unless you’re the pathetic little weed who comes last.”

“Which you won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I _ do _ know that because we’ll just… invite all our friends and we’ll all vote for you.”

Richie stares at her. “No, Bev. That’s not what you’re supposed to say. You’re supposed to say I’m not a weed and I’ll win on pure merit.”

“You’re not a weed, you’re a lovely big plant and you’ll win on pure merit. _ But _ we’ll invite all our friends, just to make sure.”

**

The audience don’t vote at comedy competitions, but no matter how many times Richie explains this, Beverly still insists that they all come to see him for moral support, like it’s a high school talent competition and he’ll be standing there with a clarinet. At one point she even tries to drag Mike along, and while Richie appreciates the sentiment, he’s nervous enough without the added pressure of failing in front of people he respects.

The Magic Club wants ten minute sets only. Richie tries to think of the best ten minutes he’s ever done. But the pressure is horrible. His is a short set in a huge pile of other short sets. He’s used to hosting bar shows and sitting on a stool monologuing with a beer. Editing has never been his strong point, in _ any _ aspect of his life. Work. Wardrobe. Diet.

So in a move that would make his mother proud, he employs his math skills to help him figure out a way to win instead. Ideally, he needs to start with his shortest joke. Get a laugh in, like, six words. Then a one minute joke, three punchlines. Two minutes to make the audience care about him, two minutes to take them somewhere unexpected. One minute callback. Rinse and repeat.

He writes new jokes. Regurgitates old ones. Scraps the lot. Fucks around, eats popcorn. Writes ten minutes of new material in a mad rush of 4am energy. Practices. Tries to remember why he likes doing stand-up. Practices again. Feels slightly better.

The Magic Club is white and modern and clean, with soft pink lighting, more like a conference room or an art gallery than a comedy club. It’s a poor design, really. Most clubs are dark and smoky so performers don’t have to look people in the eye when they’re heckled. Here, everyone is totally exposed. Maybe that’s the idea. You want to be a narcissist? Then you can damn well look your audience in the eye when you do it.

Beverly is here, as promised, with Bill and Ben in tow. Richie finds them at the bar. And then - and here’s the real kicker - Eddie.

Richie nearly chokes on his drink. He’s been doing his best to manage his stupid nerves all day. Keeping busy, cleaning the apartment, shotting tequila. All for nothing, it seems. He wants to throw up all over Eddie, and himself, and the sleek white bar and all its artisan gins.

“Trust me, I know this is fucking weird. The others insisted,” Eddie says in a low voice, as soon as they get a moment alone together. “If you want me to go, I will.”

“Do _ you _ want to go?” asks Richie, folding his arms tight across his chest, hoping the answer is somehow a simultaneous yes and no.

“Well, no. Now I’m here… I think it’s a good idea for us to do something normal for a change.”

“This is hardly normal, Eds.”

“Yeah, well, I would’ve settled for an amicable brunch but you haven’t damn well asked me, have you?”

“You haven’t asked me either!”

Eddie looks incredulous. “I invited you to that screening of _ The Acid Eaters_, like, two weeks ago, _ and _ Mexican Night at Stage 48, so do not even start.”

“I thought you were just being _ nice_.”

“Nice? Richie, hanging out was your idea! I said ‘text me’! Did I miss something? Was this all a dream? Was I speaking in Arabic?”

“I was, like, fourteen wine coolers deep when I said that, okay, I wasn’t considering the implications of hanging out with a guy who’s not single.” Richie unfolds his arms, grappling in thin air for something that isn’t there. “I am trying to be a better person. I am trying not to mess with other people’s lives.”

“I _ am _ single, asshole. You would know if you ever asked.”

Richie stops dead, dropping his arms. “You are?”

Eddie sighs, pursing his lips. In the background, by the bar, Bill is trying to pronounce the names of the imported vodkas.

“I dated that guy for, like, three weeks, man. He was so boring he put me to sleep. No, literally. I fell asleep while he spoke.” Eddie pauses. “More than once.”

“I thought…” Richie puts his face in his hands to stop himself from screaming. When he takes them away again, he sees people filtering towards the stage. “I have to go.”

“I’ve put you off, haven’t I?” Eddie says, chewing on his bottom lip. “I’ve fucked you up now. I should go.”

“No,” Richie says quickly. “Um. Oh, fuck. Eddie?”

“Yes?” Eddie looks up at him, big eyes earnest. His freckles are darker than usual, like he’s been spending time in the sun.

“Eddie,” Richie says again.

“What?”

“I’m really glad you came. I am. I’m really happy to see you. I’ve wanted to see you for ages and I’m just so… fucking stupid and weird that I couldn’t bring myself to do anything about it. I didn’t want to have to hang out with you and know that you were dating someone else. Because I still have feelings for you, okay? I still have hella fucking feelings. But the thing is… the thing is…”

“What? What is it?”

The host is starting to weave his way into the audience now, chatting and joking, as people settle in their seats. He spots Beverly folding her jacket over the back of a chair, shooting him a worried look.

“I wrote a whole new set for this,” Richie says quickly.

“That’s good?” says Eddie. “Isn’t it?”

“A lot of it’s about you.”

“Oh.”

“And me.”

“Okay. Um. I guess that’s to be expected.” He hesitates. “Is it… bad?”

“No.” Richie shakes his head. “I mean, it’s just… us.”

Eddie’s face breaks into a smile, still perceptibly nervous, but genuine at least. And sweet.

“Alright. Well.” He nods to himself, looking at the floor, then back up at Richie. He takes a deep breath. “Let’s hope it wins you some fucking money, at least.”

When Richie steps out on stage, midway through the night, the audience are already tipsy, warmed up and receptive. Weirdly, seeing Eddie has tempered, rather than bolstered, his nerves. Two double whiskey and gingers have helped.

“Hello,” he says, moving the mic stand out of his way once the audience have settled and the lights have dimmed. “Don’t worry, this is my real voice.”

They laugh, and there it is, every comic’s wish; that first merciful sign of acceptance. The last of his nerves gurgle away, replaced by this unmatchable surge of glee that only performing in front of an audience ever seems to give him.

“So I kind of have a dilemma. I wrote this whole set about this guy I’ve been sleeping with. We broke things off because I have issues and, well, he’s actually just turned up. Unexpectedly.” He pauses as a murmur of excitement ripples through the crowd. To the far left, a woman cackles. “So rather than ad-lib a whole bunch of different jokes,” he continues, pulling a stool from the side of the stage and sitting on it, “I’m probably just gonna blank out anything from the original set that might offend him. If I go silent mid-sentence, just assume there was originally a joke there about his dick, his mother, or his height. That make sense? Okay.”

The audience laughs again, and he sees people trying to turn to look around themselves.

“No, no, I’m not gonna embarrass him, I won’t point out who it is,” he tells them. Then points to a huge, stocky, square straight man in the front row. “I mean, it’s not this guy.”

**

He doesn’t win. He places second, and the host gives him a bunch of cocktail and antipasti vouchers off-stage.

“Robbed!” Bev shrieks, throwing her arms around him. Then she plucks the vouchers from him. “Excellent, though, thank you.”

“Uh huh.”

“Told you you were funnier when you have a boyfriend,” she murmurs as she pulls away, a cheeky grin on her face as she prods his chest.

“What? I’m not -”

“Are you planning on doing some networking, Richie, or are we gonna make our merry way to that _ delightful _ looking rooftop bar across the street?” Bill interrupts, clapping a heavy hand on his shoulder. He’s already about four Moscow Mules deep so there’s no point trying to stop him.

“Uh, rooftop bar, sure,” says Richie, patting his pockets for his wallet. “I’ve just gotta get my stuff.”

“What _ stuff _ did you bring?” asks Bill, already halfway out the door. “A lunchbox? Change of shoes?”

As Richie heads backstage for his jacket and water bottle, a very tiny woman in a dress shirt and braces taps him on the back.

“Richie? Sydney.” She holds out her hand. “Great job tonight.”

“Oh, thanks!” He pauses, shaking her small hand very tentatively. “You don’t, uh. You don’t want an autograph or something, do you? I always find stuff like that weird ‘cause I’m not actually -”

She hands him a glossy leaflet instead of answering. He turns it the right way up. It says ‘Long Island Comedy Festival’ in big orange letters.

“Invitation only,” she elaborates, pointing to the bottom where she’s signed her name. “I think you’d be great.”

“Oh. Oh! It’s a - you’re not - please forget what I said about the autograph, that was… embarrassing.”

“It’s not for a couple of months yet. Just look it up once you’re home, my details are at the bottom, and get back to me when you know if you want a spot. And Richie?”

He’s still gazing at it. Cash prize. Invitation only. _ Invi-motherfucking-tation only_.

“Hm?” he says, half looking up.

“Assuming you do this full time, your social media profiles could do with some work. To be frank, they suck.” She holds her phone up and gives it a little shake, to indicate she’s been spying on him, then taps a manicured nail on the flyer. “Hopefully see you in Long Island!”

He walks to the bar across the street on slightly wobbly legs. He feels like he could float, if he just lifted both feet off the ground. He shoots a quick text to Stan to let him know how the show went, then takes the stairs to the roof terrace two at a time.

“So,” he says, clapping one hand to Ben’s back and another to Bill’s once he gets to the bar. “Who’s buying this runner up a drink?”

It’s still warm out, the air thick and smoky, and the terrace lit by string lights and the hazy purple glow of the city in the distance. They congregate at a little standing table and clink beer bottles together in the muggy air. As soon as he gets the opportunity, while the others embark on a long conversation about whether to buy vodka fish bowls or sangria, and whether or not it’s polite to be drunk when they inevitably drop in on Mike at Screamin’ Beans on the way home, Richie grabs Eddie for a moment alone.

“Still friends?” he asks lightly, leaning against the railings of the terrace, fiddling nervously with a plastic vine.

“Well,” says Eddie, pretending to think about it. “I could’ve done without those super brash voice impressions, but besides that… yeah, still friends.”

“That’s exactly how you sound, though?”

“Well, it’s not. But you’re on a high, so I’ll let you have it.”

Richie smiles. “I’m really glad you came.”

“Really? ‘Cause when you first saw me you kinda looked like you were gonna throw up.” They’re standing close enough that Eddie can brush his shoulder to Richie’s, to show there’s no bite to his words.

Richie sighs, all the same, peering down at the night time traffic below. He lets go off the vine and wipes his damp palms on his jeans. “I guess I’m just not used to seeing you without... knowing I’m gonna see you? Does that make sense? I’m trying to come to terms with the idea of, like. Presenting myself…” He waves his hands, looking for the word. “Freely. It’s a whole thing I’m not nearly drunk enough to bore you with. But I have it under control. Self-improvement is my bitch right now. Seriously. I’ve got books. I use charcoal soap. I’m exercising -”

“You’re _ exercising_?”

“Uh, yeah, asshole, no need to sound so surprised. I figured we could go long-distance running together some time.”

Eddie huffs a laugh into the neck of his beer before taking a sip. “Okay, fuck you.”

“What’s up? Scared you don’t have it in you anymore? I have my badass little gold shorts ready and everything.”

Eddie looks up at him and - God, how long has it been since they’ve seen each other? He looks _ so _ cute. He’s in clothes Richie’s never seen before. Tanned and healthy from the start of a city summer, and Richie’s wasted weeks missing this. Idiot.

“It’s not exactly an ideal first date,” Eddie says, pursing his lips to hide a grin. “But I guess if it’s all you’re offering..?”

“Oh, I could - do - I could do _ way _ better,” Richie garbles, stumbling over his words. Smooth.

“_Phew_.”

A moment’s silence. Richie’s to fill.

“Although, for efficiency’s sake, we could just say the first one starts… now?”

“What, are you in a rush or something?” Eddie asks him, smile coming out now. His voice is soft, for once.

Richie shakes his head. “Just wanna make up for lost time.”

Still slightly cautious, he slips his hand into Eddie’s. Eddie squeezes his fingers gently. Relieved, Richie squeezes back.

“Okay,” Eddie grins, locking his fingers further into Richie’s. “Then it’s a date.”

Nothing changes, even though everything has. The city carries on beneath their feet, noisy but ever patient and waiting. Eddie tugs at the back of Richie’s neck to pull him down, but their lips only touch for the briefest moment before a slam, followed by a cheer, erupts from their table several feet away. The slam comes courtesy of some very _ large _ electric blue and pink fish bowls; the cheer, of course, is from Bill, Ben and Beverly’s delight.

“Uh, should we be getting in on this?” says Eddie, pulling back slightly to jerk a thumb in their direction.

“I think that we probably should be,” Richie nods.

“I mean, we can always come back to, you know -” Eddie gestures between the two of them with one hand, his other still holding on to Richie’s. “This.”

“We have all the time in the world,” Richie agrees, and he isn’t sure if he’s dragging Eddie, or if Eddie’s dragging him, but they’re back at the table in seconds.

Bev hands them swirly blue paper straws and pushes a whole bowl towards them. Then drags another towards herself. Then she stops, like a light bulb’s just gone on above her head, and steps back from the table to pull her phone from her pocket.

“Wait, don’t start, let’s take a picture first,” she insists. “Summer’s here and we need to start documenting it. Because life is what? _ Good_.”

It’s funny. Richie doesn’t even have the urge to dispute it. In fact, for once, he doesn’t have the urge to say anything at all. He smiles at his friends, and then he smiles at Eddie, and then they smile into the camera together. Maybe, right now, there isn’t a joke to be told.

And maybe that’s absolutely fine.  
  


End


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